Marco Polo thought Sri Lanka was the finest island of its size in all the world - and we agree. Explore the majestic ancient cities of . Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Sigiriya. Stretch out on secluded palm-fringed beaches. Follow the glowing strings of lights on the pilgrim trail up Adam's Peak. Ride through hillside tea plantations in a rattling train. This guide gives you the inside information on Sri Lanka's richest experiences. GET THE LOWDOWN - our dedicated Snapshot, Culture and History chapters are your ticket to understanding local life . GO ON SAFARI - get up close to Sri Lanka's birds, elephants and leopards: our detailed national parks information shows you how DON'T JUST LIE THERE - we tempt you off the beach with Sri Lanka's best diving, hiking and surfing . KNOW YOUR KITUL FROM YOUR KIRI BATH - our Food & Drink chapter will help you gobble your way through the island's celebrated cuisine . FIND YOUR WAY - easy-to-read maps show you where to go .

In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating fromcollege, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild andunexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin.Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, ayoung woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest memberof this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins herunabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materialswith which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only throughtime and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her tosee the love she lived through and sometimes left behind. By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wifeand mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earthin which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight andwritten in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenchingode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape and thepeculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even i

From the author of A Venetian Affair and Lucia comes acharming odyssey in the path of the mysterious Zen brothers, whoexplored parts of the New World a century before Columbus, andbecame both a source of scandal and a cause célèbre amonggeographers in the following centuries. This delightful journey begins with Andrea di Robilant’sserendipitous discovery of a travel narrative published in Venicein 1558 by the Renaissance statesman Nicolò Zen: the text and itsfascinating nautical map re-created the travels of two of theauthor’s ancestors, brothers who explored the North Atlantic in the1380s and 1390s. Di Robilant set out to discover why later, in thenineteenth century, the Zens’ account came under attack as one ofthe greatest frauds in geographical history. Was their map—and eventheir journey—partially or perhaps entirely faked? In Irresistible North the author follows the Zens’ route from theFaeroes to Shetland to Iceland and Greenland, greeted by characterswho help unravel t

From adventurer, explorer, photographer, writer, pied piperPeter Beard—eleven irresistible tales, told to his daughter in histented encampment at Hog Ranch, Kenya, about life, about living,about Africa. He writes of the East African hills he came to know so well overfour decades, where time slows to infinity in a great bottomless,bottle green underwater world . . . about Nairobi in the 1950s,still a quaint, eccentric pioneer town, full of characters of allstripes and tribes, where rhinoceros roamed the streets and localresidents went to the movies in pajamas. He writes of the camp he built twelve miles outside of Nairobi sothat he would never be off safari, a forty-acre patch of bushcalled Hog Ranch (abutting Karen Blixen’s plantation), named forthe families of warthogs who wandered into camp, a camp populatedwith waterbuck, suni, dik-diks, leopard, giraffe, and occasionallylion and buffalo. In “Big Pig at Hog Ranch,” Beard tells the story of Thaka(translation from the Kikuyu: