LAURENCE MACKINreviews Adventure!: Earth's Most Thrilling Experiencesand Lonely Planet's Middle Eastguide
Adventure!: Earth’s Most Thrilling Experiences
Time Out, £16.99
It’s all very well going on holiday to relax and recuperate, but sometimes it is the thrills and spills of an adventure that last in the memory, and nearly any of the trips listed here would happily fit into the once-in-a-lifetime category. The layouts are crisp and the photography is top drawer, making for a colourful and enjoyable book to flick through and pick ideas from. Not all of the trips are for those with marathon levels of fitness, and some could conceivably be squeezed into an extended weekend away, though it’s the more time-consuming and adventurous stuff that really whets the travelling appetite. These will not all be completely familiar even to the adventurously inclined reader: hearing about trekking in Torres del Paine might ring a bell, for example, but you’ll be reaching for the map to figure out where the 5,600m Mount Damavand is.
Middle East
Lonely Planet, £18.99
It’s in Iran. But you can be forgiven for not knowing, as the Middle East remains perhaps the largest tourist blind spot in the world. If Iran sounds a bit too turbulent, you could get a flavour of the region in the other countries covered by this guide: Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and, perhaps most surprisingly, Iraq. This seems too much for one guide. Disclaimers are scattered throughout, and the Iraqi section was updated only based on trips to Iraqi Kurdistan; the Arab areas of Iraq are off limits to travellers, so the information on it is based on the author’s experience there as a war correspondent.