Here are 100 books that Africa Solo fans have personally recommended if you like
Africa Solo.
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Sean Conway is a record-breaking endurance cyclist who has cycled over 100,000 miles in the last decade including cycling around the world, LEJOG twice, and the world record for the fastest person to cycle across Europe.
Also very well written. Charlie chooses the roads less travelled and he meanders for nearly 4 years from the UK to Singapore then back and down through Africa to Cape Town before turning around and cycling back up Africa to the UK. He got arrested in Tibet. Had a pony stolen in Mongolia and nearly got killed by a drunken mob in Ethiopia. Gripping throughout.
Iβm a writer, living in southwest France since 1995, and previously in Kenya for 20 years. Travel has always been my passion. Iβve written about hiking across France in Best Foot Forward, touring the perimeter by camping car in Travels with Tinkerbelle, cycling through the Marne Valley in The Valley of Heaven and Hell, and a Kenyan safari in Safari Ants, Baggy Pants and Elephants. Recently, due to COVID and with an elderly dog that suffers from separation anxiety, I couldn't leave for any length of time; I satisfy my wanderlust by reading other peopleβs adventures. My taste is for tales that include plenty of humour, and Iβve selected five which I have particularly enjoyed.
A beautifully painted account of the authorβs journey through Africa, as much about his conflicting emotions as about cycling. Mainly eating jam sandwiches, and sleeping in dangerous places and filthy hostels, he pedals his way towards South Africa across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and war-torn Sudan. He finds friendship in unexpected places, and disappointment in others.
It appealed to me as both a cycling adventure, and having lived in Kenya I was keen to read about his experiences in Africa.
This enthralling account details Alastair Humphrey's epic journey across Africa, through Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya. His experience is at times brutal, and though he faces loneliness, despair, and harsh conditions, he also survives through trust in the kindness of strangers.
Moods of Future Joys is a story of the triumphs over adversities, of one man who set off from his home in Yorkshire to cycle the world, fundraise for charity and... to live a little.
Iβm a writer, living in southwest France since 1995, and previously in Kenya for 20 years. Travel has always been my passion. Iβve written about hiking across France in Best Foot Forward, touring the perimeter by camping car in Travels with Tinkerbelle, cycling through the Marne Valley in The Valley of Heaven and Hell, and a Kenyan safari in Safari Ants, Baggy Pants and Elephants. Recently, due to COVID and with an elderly dog that suffers from separation anxiety, I couldn't leave for any length of time; I satisfy my wanderlust by reading other peopleβs adventures. My taste is for tales that include plenty of humour, and Iβve selected five which I have particularly enjoyed.
A vivid, amusing account of the author and her friend cycling and sleeping in the wild from Bolivia to Argentina. It is a story of determination and endurance as they push themselves to the extreme, always taking the hardest, highest route. Exhaustion, frustration, and sickness put their friendship to the test.Β
As somebody who is the polar opposite, always seeking the easiest way, I was fascinated by this coupleβs approach to adventure, and awed by their achievements. Β
**WINNER ofΒ the 2020 Amazon Kindle Storyteller Literary Award**
"Llama DramaΒ is simply hilarious.Β If anyoneΒ wants something witty and moving at the same time. Also, something empowering, then this is the one for them. I literally inhaled it."Β -Β Β Claudia Winkleman, TV Presenter and Author
What Amazon readers are saying about Llama Drama:
β β β β β Β βLoved every minute of it!β
β β β β β Β βAn antidote for the madness of 2020β
β β β β β Β βTruly inspiringβ
β β β β β Β βA brilliant book for anyone interested in travel, conquering their fears, cycling, adventure, South Americaβ
Iβm a writer, living in southwest France since 1995, and previously in Kenya for 20 years. Travel has always been my passion. Iβve written about hiking across France in Best Foot Forward, touring the perimeter by camping car in Travels with Tinkerbelle, cycling through the Marne Valley in The Valley of Heaven and Hell, and a Kenyan safari in Safari Ants, Baggy Pants and Elephants. Recently, due to COVID and with an elderly dog that suffers from separation anxiety, I couldn't leave for any length of time; I satisfy my wanderlust by reading other peopleβs adventures. My taste is for tales that include plenty of humour, and Iβve selected five which I have particularly enjoyed.
This is possibly the worst cycling adventure ever undertaken. It makes my list because everything that can go wrong does. Her bicycle is too big. Everything is shut. Thereβs no hot water in the showers. Yet still they pedal on.
Even the Greek island cruise is a disaster.
Acerbic, honest, extremely non-PC, itβs a schadenfreude delight. I rather unkindly couldnβt wait for the next catastrophe to strike this couple, because it made me laugh so much.Β Β
βInspiring proof that you need neither be under 25 nor even bearded to have a terrific adventure.β Alastair Humphreys, Author & Adventurer When Donna and Iain, a couple in their late forties with no previous cycling experience, decide on the spur of the moment to cycle across an entire continent, you can rightly assume things might not go according to plan. Armed with little knowledge but much determination, they attempt a self-supported cycle tour, carrying everything they need and camping along the way, normally the domain of hardy, beardy adventurers or Olympic athletes. Join The Beardless Adventurer and her inconvenienceβ¦
Outdoors has always been a nourishing place for me, even when I edged into risky or dangerous places, especially solo. When I got rid of my car (for financial reasons), I found my options to reach outdoor adventures limited. Soon after, I began working in transportation, tourism, and recreation and sought ways for everyone to access outdoor recreational opportunities, regardless of their abilities or any limiting barriers. Slow travel is broadly inclusive, enabling anyone to benefit from outdoor experiences and their transformative potential. Slow travel helped me feel less alone, more connected, more balanced emotionally, healthier physically, and more creative; it revealed the path to Love.
Yes, give me one woman adventuring on a bike. Yes, have her be a nerd (or a geek or whatever)! Yes, have her teach me fun words about butterfly bugs, like frass, imago, instar, and eclose. Yes, have her take me to a mountain forest in Mexico where butterflies hang from trees like moss. Yes, the journey is the destination.Β
I applaud Dykmanβs awareness of resource use, climate change, and connecting the whole sphere of human influence to ecology and the effect that has on the miraculous migration lifecycle of eastern monarch butterflies. It blows my mind that a little bug somehow knows to fly from Mexico to Canada and back when it takes three to four generations to do so.
Sara Dykman made history when she became the first person to bicycle alongside monarch butterflies on their storied annual migration-a round-trip adventure that included three countries and more than 10,000 miles. Equally remarkable, she did it solo, on a bike cobbled together from used parts.
In Bicycling with Butterflies-praised as "poetic" (Publishers Weekly) and called "a collective cry for climate action" (Booklist)-Dykman recounts her incredible journey. We're beside her as she navigates unmapped roads in foreign countries, checks roadside milkweed for monarch eggs, and shares her passion with eager schoolchildren, skeptical bar patrons, and unimpressed border officials. We also meetβ¦
Since I first visited Africa in 2004 Iβve found it difficult to tear myself away. Iβve lived in South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, and Sudan and travelled in all corners of the continent. Iβve participated in a revolution, hung out with the illegal fishermen of Lake Victoria, been cursedβand protectedβby witch doctors, and learned Swahili. Iβve also read extensively about the place, written three books about it, and broadcast from it for the BBC World Service. In my other life I research and write about international development for universities and global organisations. This too has a focus on Africa.
This short book is without doubt the best introduction to African travel (and in my opinion one of the greatest travel books ever written).
Ranging across the whole continent, Kapuscinskiβs evocative writing, although not always sticking religiously to factual details, captures the essenceβand the magicβof the place like nobody else can. The book, along with his other great works on Africa Another Day of Life and The Emperor, was a major influence on both why I wanted to get to know Africa and how I write about it.Β
'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'. Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In astudy that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained meditation on themosaic of peoples and practises we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itselfβ¦
By Bruce Bueno de Mesquita And Alastair Smith
Author
Why am I passionate about this?
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith are professors of politics at New York University. They use the mathematical approach of game theory to understand the incentives of leaders in different settings.Β The Dictatorβs Handbook distills decades of academic work into a few essential rules that encapsulate how leaders come to power and remain there.
All of Kapuscinskiβs books are gems. He traveled Africa and other parts of the developing world as a Soviet journalist. The Emperor describes the rule and decline of the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie. The dry day-to-dry accounts of the emperorβs benign neglect for his people is chilling. Haile Selassie knew to keep those around him happy and not to worry about the people: βA man starved all his life will never rebelβ¦. No one raised his voice or hand there. But just let the subject start to eat his fill and then try to take the bowl away, and immediately he rises in rebellion. The usefulness of hunger is that a hungry man thinks only of bread.β.
A "sensitive, powerful ... history" (The New York Review of Books) of a man living amidst nearly unimaginable pomp and luxury while his people teetered netween hunger and starvation.
Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Elect of God, Lion of Judah, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, reigned from 1930 until he was overthrown by the army in 1974. While the fighting still raged, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland's leading foreign correspondent, traveled to Ethiopia to seek out and interview Selassie's servants and closest associates on how the Emperor had ruled and why he fell. ThisΒ is Kapuscinski'sβ¦
Ever since spending seven years of my youth in East Africa, I have read the literature of that continent. I have relished the incredible novels of authors like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Maaza Mengiste, but I have also sought out stories of those who entered Africa from outside, wanting to confirm my experience and to make sense of it. My reading has included masterpieces like Abraham Vergheseβs novelCutting for Stone or Ryszard Kapuscinskiβs journalistic expose The Emperor. But here are a few personal memoirs that have given me a basis for my own understanding of being an expatriate shaped profoundly by life in Africa.
Some would claim Coetzeeβs Boyhoodis an autobiographical novel, and others would insist it is a fictionalized memoir.Β In any case, it is a powerful depiction of a childβs experience of being raised in the harsh, racist culture of Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa. Maybe because the author decided to tell the story from the 3rd person perspectiveβas if standing outside of himselfβthe bleakness of his home and community presses home twice as hard.Β One senses, behind the cruelty and callousness, the buried ugliness of entrenched bigotry. I lived in a kinder missionary community, learning to admire the people I encountered in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan, but over time I had to recognize subtler prejudices that went with that evangelistic expatriate culture.Β Boyhood spoke to me in a necessary, truth-telling way that was not comfortable but very important.
The critically acclaimed author of In the Heart of the Country tells his personal story of growing up under apartheid in South Africa with a father he cannot respect and a mother he both adores and despises. 12,500 first printing.
Our discovery that we are modified monkeys rather than modified mud is a human achievement on a par with a Mozart opera or a Vermeer painting. As a historian and philosopher of science, my lifelong mission has been to see how this knowledge transcends earlier myths about divine creation and opens the way to a far richer and more optimistic vision of human nature, our achievements, and our future possibilities. New knowledge can be terrifying. It can also be exciting and liberating. It is an obligation, a privilege, and a joy to be able to express our full humanity. The authors I shall introduce exemplify this so very much.
If you can read only one book on human evolution, this is it. βLucy,β a fossil Australopithecusafarensis, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, is the proverbial βmissing link.β About three million years old, she had a chimpanzee-size brain, about 400cc (as opposed to modern humans, about 1200cc), and yet walked upright. Told by Don Johanson, one of the team who discovered her, and science writer Martin Edey, the book is informative, serious, and yet at the same time written with a light touch that makes the tale akin to a thriller like Stephen King. It is a thriller. Our great great grandma was not Eve, eating illicit apples, but a modified monkey roaming the plains of Africa.
βA glorious successβ¦The science manages to be as exciting and spellbinding as the juiciest gossipβ (San Franscisco Chronicle) in the story of the discovery of βLucyββthe oldest, best-preserved skeleton of any erect-walking human ancestor ever found.
When Donald Johanson found a partical skeleton, approximately 3.5 million years old, in a remote region of Ethiopia in 1974, a headline-making controversy was launched that continues on today. Bursting with all the suspense and intrigue of a fast paced adventure novel, here is Johansonβs lively account of the extraordinary discovery of βLucy.β By expounding the controversial change Lucy makes in our view ofβ¦
I grew up in a small town, with wonderful librarians who introduced me to books I remember fondly to this day. The Flicka, Ricka, Dicka series, the Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Beldon, Nancy Drew, and, of course, Little Women shaped my love for stories about relationships and the simple pleasures of daily life. Whether itβs a mystery or a memoir, I want interesting interactions between the main characters, meaty descriptions of daily activities and affairs, and, of course, a happy ending. As Iβve gotten older, I like books with older protagonists; those are hard to come byβone reason I wrote a novel about the adventures of five middle-aged girlfriends!
I canβt remember when Iβve enjoyed a book this much.
Sean is a brilliant writer, and funny as all get out. We share a love of the South, a love of words, a fear of snakes, and an aversion to traffic. As I read, I earmarked nearly a dozen passages I shared with family and friends, like, βCovid cases climbing like decisions at a Billy Graham crusadeβ and βI have nothing against fog machines and stage lights, but ordering a Starbucks in a church lobby just feels wrong."
His account of his and his wifeβs bicycle trek down the Great Allegheny Passage and the C&O Canal Towpath trail put to rest once and for all any aspiration I harbored about walking the Appalachian Trail. Some things are better read about!
A laugh-out-loud funny true story of a loving relationship, a grand adventure, and a promise kept.
It was only a few years after the starry-eyed young couple got married when scary news threatened to take the wind out of their sails. But Sean Dietrich's wife, Jamie, wouldn't let it. She dared to hope for and plan for a great big adventure, and she made him promise to do it with her. For love and the promise of biscuits along the way, Sean--who was never an athlete of any kind--undertook the bike ride of a lifetime and lived to talk aboutβ¦
