Posted by bradtpress on 22 September 2009
‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ to the left, ‘Mud Wrestling’ to the right. Faced with this kind of choice taken from Weird World, Bradt’s new travel compendium of bizarre images co-published with Wanderlust magazine, there’s only one possible conclusion… Wherever you are in the world, no matter how remote or how undiscovered, at all times you’re never more than a camera shutter click from profound weirdness.
Feeling at a loose end today? Why not pierce your face with the entire haul from a Moss Side knife amnesty. Frustrated by attempts to insert ships in bottles? Stuff snakes in them instead. Stuck for that all-important 102nd use for a dead cat? Page 140’s image of a Pussy Willow says it all. Left in the dark about how best to honour your ancestors? Build a chandelier from their bones – it’s obvious.
As Wanderlust’s Editor-in-chief Lyn Hughes comments, ‘This book is a fascinating insight into the world’s quirks and oddities waiting to be discovered on your travels. Our readers have captured images so diverse, and in many cases arresting, the only thing to do now is get packing and shoot the next edition!’
Entries in a joint Wanderlust and Bradt Travel Guides photography competition have furnished Weird World with a wealth of original images, capturing in full colour the surprising, the quirky, the eccentric and the downright odd. As we’re increasingly lectured about an apparently unstoppable process of globalisation, Weird World celebrates diversity and the individual character of nations and their citizens. Ultimately, these are the differences that catalyse our curiosity, they are the reasons why we travel, and what validates stepping beyond the comfortable threshold of our own back yard – sod the ‘staycation’, weird travel rocks.
Title: Weird World
Author: Bradt/Wanderlust
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Publication: October 2009
Price: £14.99
ISBN: 978 1 84162 318 4
Posted in Press Releases | Tagged: New Titles, Weird World | Comments Off
Posted by bradtpress on 4 September 2009
Bangladesh – it’s poverty-stricken, flat, flooded, overcrowded, corrupt, has a fatal attraction for cyclones and nestles sweatily in the fragrant armpit of India. This is how most people conceive one of the world’s youngest nations, independent since 1971 following a vicious war of secession with Pakistan. Why would anyone choose to go there? Mikey Leung, co-author of Bradt’s new Bangladesh guide, doesn’t shy from the reality. ‘To be frank, researching this guide was a right pain in the backside.’ However, Leung expands and invites travellers beyond the headlines ‘inside this friendly region of south Asia whose people may be short on space and material wealth, but who possess hearts of infinite kindness.’
On Dhaka’s choked streets, Bradt’s Bangladesh invites travellers to follow their noses through Sadarghat’s Somme-like fish market, points the way to Haji Biriyani in Old Dhaka – the city’s best – and offers a masterclass in outmanoeuvring silent-but-deadly bicycle rickshaws. Beyond the maelstrom of headache-inducing CNGs, kamikaze buses and belligerent Tata trucks, Leung and co-author Belinda Meggitt point the way to rural Bangladesh. Explorations of this ‘republic of rivers’ (the Ganges/Brahmaputra River Delta) aboard a ‘Rocket’ – one of four 100-year-old scheduled paddle steamers – are serene, in a very Bangladeshi way. Elsewhere, chapters detail the world’s largest expanse of littoral mangroves – the Sundarban, with its myriad channels enlivened by the antics of endangered endemic river dolphins, and whose forests are gingered up by a healthy tiger population with a penchant for Bengali honey collectors. Perhaps the biggest surprise described in the book are the Chittagong Hill Tracts: they’re hilly for a start, and sparsely populated by indigenous tribes owing more to Burma than Bangladesh and maintaining Buddhist religious traditions at odds with Bengali Islam.
For anyone – NGO worker, business traveller or tourist – travelling to Dhaka and beyond, Bradt’s Bangladesh is now the only English-language resource to provide up-to-date independent travel information and advice. For those interested in Dakar, sit down, we need to talk…
Mikey Leung volunteered for VSO in Bangladesh. He currently reports current affairs for CBC and other worldwide radio stations whilst combining writing for numerous business and in-flight magazines.
Belinda Meggitt spent a year in Chittagong as an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development before taking up travel photography.
Title: Bangladesh
Author: Mikey Leung & Belinda Meggitt
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Publication: September 2009
Price: £15.99
ISBN: 978 1 84162 293 4
Posted in Press Releases | Tagged: Asia, Bangladesh, New Titles | Comments Off
