In 1895/6 the sixty-year-old Mark Twain set off on a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts from a publishing company bankruptcy, notes from which a year later became his final travel book Following the Equator. Two years later he wrote, 'How I did loathe that journey around the world! except the sea-part and India.' Although he was only in India for just over two of the twelve months, his exploits and observations there take up forty per cent of the book-and by common consent are by far the best and liveliest part of it. In The Indian Equator the Mark Twain travel trilogist Ian Strathcarron, his wife and photographer Gillian and his factota Sita follow in his mentor's footsteps, train tracks and boat wakes tracing the route that Twain, his wife Livy, his daughter Clara, his manager Smythe and his bearer Satan took as they crisscrossed the sub-continent. Leaving from the Bombay that was and the Mumbai that is, both writers follow the lecture circuit of old India--including...

In Never Fear – Reliving the Life of Sir Francis Chichester Ian Strathcarron follows in the footsteps and wakes of Sir Francis's life of adventure, adversity and triumph. Born in 1901 into a troubled childhood in rural Devon, he suffered through the sadism of the English public school system, then in 1918 left for New Zealand where he made his first fortune. There he took up flying and in 1930 became one of the first aviators to fly from London to Sydney. After being the first solo flyer across the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Australia, he set off to circle the world, only to crash, nearly fatally, in Japan.After serving in the RAF in the Second World War, he took up sailing at the age of fifty-four and in twelve years became the most famous yachtsman in the world. Along the way there are struggles and triumphs, climaxing in being knighted with Sir Francis Drake's sword in Greenwich. Ian Strathcarron, himself an aviator, yachtsman and adventurer, follows him all the way,...

Lord Byron's Grand Tour is recorded as impressions in his own letters and journals, more methodically in the diary of his travelling companion John Cam Hobhouse, and reflected poetically in the first two cantos of the epic poem that was to make his fame and start his legend.Lord Strathcarron's re-Tour follows in Byron's footsteps, revisiting the places the poet visited two hundred years ago and comparing what he found then to what one finds there now. At each point the re-Tour meets today's equivalents to the kings, consuls, governors, chieftains and gangsters that the Grand Tour met before it. Witty and perceptive, the re-Tour reveals much about Lord Byron and much too about how the world has changed in two centuries.

In 1867 the Daily Alta California commissioned Mark Twain to cover the story of the world's first luxury cruise, a six-month round tour to the Holy Land from New York on board the Quaker City, an ex-Civil War Mississippi side-wheel paddle steamer. The captain, crew and passengers were highly respectable Presbyterian Christians on a mission; the Islamic Holy Land was under loosening Ottoman control. The interchangeable infidels and zealots saw Mark Twain as a distracting influence and he saw them as a wonderful source of material for comments on the folly of the human condition. The resultant 'The Innocents Abroad' was his bestselling book in his lifetime and is still regarded as a classic of travel writing and a masterpiece of satire on political and religious excess.Ian Strathcarron follows Mark Twain and his caravanserai as it sways across the Holy Land and the two writers' contrasting adventures and observations are told in Innocence and War.