The Adventures Of A Typical American: India by Chad Thomson

When young American Chad Thomson sets out on the adventure of a lifetime, little does he know how much of an impact the world will have on him. In this first installment of his travel memoirs, Chad begins his round-the-world travel adventure in typical American style. During his four weeks in India he discovers:
Nepal is not in India
The origin of the word tiffin (a mix of the words tin and muffin)
McDonald’s in India is not like the McDonald’s in the USA
And much more!
Follow Chad as he follows exactly what the Bible tells him (not the Holy Bible, the travelers Bible) and immerses himself in the local culture, meeting people from Australia, the USA and even one or two from India!

About Chad:
Chad Thomson is just a typical American leaving the comforts of his home country to explore the world. He was inspired to write about his adventures after reading the many, many travel blogs online. He writes travel stories and articles at http://www.backpackingwithchad.com

This is his story.*

*not the whole story, just the part that takes place in India. Stay tuned for further installments of The Adventures Of A Typical American!

The Adventures Of A Typical American: India by Chad Thomson

The Adventures Of A Typical American: India by Chad Thomson

Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan by Will Ferguson

It had never been done before. Not in 2,000 years of Japanese recorded history had anyone followed the Cherry Blossom Front from one end of the country to the other. Nor had anyone hitchhiked the length of Japan. But, heady on sakura and sake, Will Ferguson bet he could do both. The resulting travelogue is one of the funniest and most illuminating books ever written about Japan. And, as Ferguson learns, it illustrates that to travel is better than to arrive.

Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan

Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future by Tom Scocca

Within the past decade, Beijing has debuted as the defining city of the now and foreseeable future, and China as the ascendant global power. Beijing is the ultimate representation of China’s political and cultural capital, of its might-and threat. For so long, the city was closed off to the world, literally built around the Forbidden City, the icon of all that was ominous about China. But now, the country is eager to show off its new openness, its glory and magnanimity, and Beijing is its star. When Tom Scocca arrived in 2004-an American eager to see another culture-Beijing was looking toward welcoming the world to its Olympics four years later, and preparations were in full swing to create a renewed city.
Scocca talked to the scientists tasked with changing the weather; interviewed designers and architects churning out projects; checked out the campaign to stop public spitting; documented the planting of trees, the rerouting of traffic, the demolition of the old city, and the construction of the new metropolis. Beijing Welcomes You is a glimpse into the future and an encounter with an urban place we do not yet fully comprehend, and the superpower it is essential we get to know better.

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The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart’s moving, sparsely poetic account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 has been immediately hailed as a classic. Caught between hostile nations, warring factions and competing ideologies, at the time, Afghanistan was in turmoil following the US invasion. Travelling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible, mountainous route once taken by the Mohgul Emperor, Babur the Great, Stewart was nearly defeated by the extreme, hostile conditions. Only due to the help of an unexpected companion and the generosity of the people he met on the way, did he survive to report back with unique insight on a region closed to the world by twenty-four years of war.

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All Elevations Unknown: An Adventure In The Heart Of Borneo by Sam Lightner

In the spring of 1999, armed with little more than a description from a book and a map labeled “all elevations unknown,” Sam Lightner and his German rock-climbing buddy, Volker, found themselves deep in the jungles of Borneo on a mission to climb a mountain that was only rumored to exist. What little they knew about the mountain they had learned from the memoirs of Major Tom Harrisson, a British World War II soldier who in 1945 had been assigned the near-impossible mission of parachuting blindly into the thick Borneo rainforest–where the natives had a grisly habit of cutting off heads–to try to reclaim the island for the Allies.
A captivating, utterly original combination of travel adventure memoir and historical re-creation, All Elevations Unknown charts Lightner’s exhilarating and at times harrowing quest to ascend the mountain Batu Lawi in the face of leeches, vipers, and sweat bees, and to keep his team together in one of the earth’s most treacherous uncharted pockets. Along the way, he reconstructs a fascinating historical narrative that chronicles Tom Harrisson’s adventures there during the war and illuminates an astonishing piece of forgotten World War II history. Rife with suspense and vivid detail, the two intertwining tales open up the island of Borneo, its people, and its history in a powerful, unforgettable way, taking adventure writing to new heights.

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Axis of Evil World Tour: An American’s Travels in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea by Scott Fisher

Axis of Evil World Tour goes beyond the superficial coverage found in much of the media to bring a boots-on-the-ground look at three of the most enigmatic, difficult-to-enter countries on the planet-Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
North Korea: Visit the tense yet quiet DMZ that divides North from South, one of the eeriest places on earth. Spend time touring Pyongyang, the showcase capital that houses the regime and its elites. Travel halfway across the country to the beautiful “Heavenly Fragrance” mountain for a visit to the surreal, cult-like “museums” housing gifts to the country’s leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
Iraq: What’s it like to live on a U.S. military base during the war in Iraq? Spend two months as part of the Iraqi Survey Group, the international team that was tasked with finding Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Iran: What do Iranians think of the U.S. and Americans? You might be surprised. Travel around the country and take an inside look at Khomeini’s tomb, hear about Iran’s own fight against Al Qaeda, and take a look inside the secret world of the mullahs that really run Iran.

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River Of Time by Jon Swain

Jon Swain left Britain as a teenager. After a brief stint with the French Foreign Legion he became a journalist in Paris, but soon ended up in Vietnam and Cambodia. In five years as a young war reporter Swain lived moments of intensity and passion such as he had never known. He learnt something of life and death in Cambodia and Vietnam that he could never have perceived in Europe. He saw Indo-China in all its intoxicating beauty and saw, too, the violence and corruption of war, and was sickened by it.
Motivated by a sense of close involvement with the Cambodian people he went back into Phnom Penh just before the fall of the city to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. He was captured and was going to be executed. His life was saved by Dith Pran, the New York Times interpreter, a story told by the film The Killing Fields. In Indo-China Swain formed a passionate love affair with a French-Vietnamese girl. The demands of a war correspondent ran roughshod over his personal life and the relationship ended.
This book is one reporter’s attempt to make peace with a tumultuous past, to come to terms with his memories of fear, pain, and death, and to say adieu to the Indo-China he loved and the way of life that has gone for ever.

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The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

What makes a nation happy? Is one country’s sense of happiness the same as another’s? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who’s happy and who isn’t. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren’t, and Americans are somewhere in between…
After years of going to the world’s least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country’s different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all.
·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it’s not a good one)
·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life.
·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness!
·He asks himself why the British don’t do happiness?
In Weiner’s quest to find the world’s happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.

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The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia by Lutz Kleveman

The Caspian Region, lying south of Russia, west of China and north of Afghanistan, contains the world’s largest untapped oil and gas resources. In the years between the death of the Soviet Union and September 11, 2001, oil companies and politicians have struggled to possess and develop these resources. Using a concept immortalised by Kipling in his novel Kim, Lutz Kleveman argues that there is now a new ‘Great Game’ in the region, in which the US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran – most of which are nuclear powers – are competing.. Kleveman has produced an insightful and exacting portrait of a new theatre of war, a region in which there are few rules and in which the rewards for victory are nothing less than power and prosperity in the new century.

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Where Underpants Come from: From Checkout to Cotton Field – Travels Through the New China by Joe Bennett

When Joe Bennett bought a five-pack of ‘Made in China’ underpants in his local New Zealand hypermarket for $8.59, he wondered who on earth could be making any money, let alone profit, from the exchange. How many processes and middlemen are involved? Where and how are the pants made? And who decides on the absorbent qualities of the gusset? Where Underpants Come From tells you all you need to know — in fact, probably more — about this mystery of global commerce. Leaving his supermarket trolley behind Joe embarks on an odyssey to the new factory of the world, China, to trace his pants back to their source. Along the way he discovers the extraordinarily balanced and intricate web of contacts and exchanges that makes global trade possible — and rapidly elevating China to the status of world economic superpower. He also grapples with chopsticks, challenges his own prejudices and marvels at the contrasts in one of the world’s oldest, but fastest changing, societies. Funny, wise and insightful, it is another wonderful journey from the author of A Land of Two Halves and Mustn’t Grumble.

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