Your guide to the guides

Chill out this summer and travel the world without leaving your sun lounger. We give you a guided tour to some of the best.

Solo searching

WITHOUT RESERVATIONS
By Alice Steinbach
Random House, $34.95
Review: Barbara Harris

There comes a point when even professional observers have to stop looking and return to experiencing life. Alice Steinbach, fifty-something and a feature writer with a Pulitzer Prize under her belt, does just that when she steps outside her comfort zone and embarks on a tour of Europe on her own for a year.

Freed up from family commitments with both adult sons away from home, the single working mother affectionately refers to it as her Year of Living Dangerously. And, in breaking her routine, success and failure are no longer the criteria which govern her life.

By writing postcards to herself, a technique she used to overcome homesickness on earlier solo travels, Steinbach records her impressions of living in Paris, London, Oxford and a tour of Italy.

On the surface the task doesn't seems too onerous. But the reality is that few are plucky enough to put on hold a successful career and leave behind the cushiness of the familiar.

Steinbach's mid-life crisis was not prompted by there being anything wrong with her life but by the realisation that as: "Over the years I had fallen into the habit of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people." Those sentiments are sure to echo with many.

The advantage Steinbach has over the average person who takes time out is that her years of writing for a Baltimore newspaper have honed eye and ear to her surroundings.

Watching a sad, middle-aged street performer in Paris, she writes: "Stark white makeup covered her sagging face; her mouth was a slash of purple. Midway through the performance, when she stopped to change from boots to high-heeled silver sandals, you could see the bandages wrapped around her swollen feet and toes." Steinbach may be on holiday but the radar is still switched on.

Impulsive and self-conscious, her greatest gift is a readiness to show her vulnerability. Steinbach travels hopefully and the reader arrives charmed.

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City of Sails on Foot

WALKING AUCKLAND
By Helen Vause
New Holland Publishers, $24.95
Review: Colin Moore

There is little doubt that the best way to appreciate any city is on foot. From the pavement you experience the sight, sound and smell of a place that you'll never get from the window of a tour coach.

Auckland is no exception. In fact, the city of sails and volcanoes is a walker's treat. But oddly, for such a walkers' city, there is a dearth of guidebooks and the few available are mostly restricted to bush walks. Vause includes bush walks, such as the Kepa Reserve near Orakei, and Le Roys at Birkenhead, in her 25 "walks of discovery" but her choice is eclectic.

There are inner-city, seashore and heritage walks, a trip to the top of a volcano and another to the wildlife sanctuary of Tiritiri Matangi Island.

Any visitor - and local too - who follows even a quarter of the walks will be rewarded with a fascinating insight into Auckland.

The maps are easy to follow and the text includes where to get something to eat or drink along the way.

This is a personal selection and Vause indicates that there are many other possibilities in and around Auckland. It does seem odd that no mention is made of the Auckland City Council's signposted coast-to-coast walkway, that traverses three of the walks selected by Vause, and that there is no contact information for the Department of Conservation and the Auckland Regional Council.

Buy Walking Auckland Online

Happy Snappers

TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY: A GUIDE TO TAKING BETTER PHOTOGRAPHS
By Richard I'Anson
Lonely Planet $39.95
Review: Barbara Harris

Point-and-shoot cameras have taken the hard work out of photography but the auto-pilot mechanism that will focus and select the setting won't make you a better photographer.

On his travels around the world Richard l'Anson has fixed enough simple faults in tourist's cameras to know that many have little idea of what is going on behind the shutter.

Bright, inspiring and jargon-free l'Anson's compact guide takes the mystery out of controlling a camera. Maybe next time that stunning shot will be planned and not a fluke.

Buy Lonely Planet: Travel Photography: A Guide to Taking Better Pictures online

To the end of the world

ANTARCTICA
By Jeff Rubin
Lonely Planet, $49.95
Review: Colin Moore

It seems only yesterday that Antarctica, the last great wilderness, the frozen continent, was the most remote place on Earth, visited each year by just a handful of scientists.

How times have changed. Now they publish travel guidebooks about the place. The "they" in this case is Lonely Planet and Antarctica suits the Aussie guidebook format down to the ground, or in this case the ice.

Unlike some other guides, these are not written for the travel dolts who need to know the minutiae of urban transport, or address and telephone number of every lodge and restaurant in town.

You can find that information free at the first kiosk at the airport or railway station - as young OE travellers well know. But those same young travellers want to know something of the background of the country they are in - its culture, its politics, its history. It's the reason they travel in the first place.

As the publishers say: "At Lonely Planet, we believe the most memorable travel experiences are often those that are unexpected, and the finest discoveries are those you make yourself. Guide books are not intended to be used as if they provided a detailed set of infallible instructions."

That publishing philosophy is why Antarctica is much more than a first class guidebook; it's an excellent read for anyone remotely interested in the frozen continent.

It traverses geology, ecology and history and has separate sections on environmental issues as well as on the regions most likely to be visited by travellers on commercial tours.

Of interest - if you haven't been keeping up with world news briefs - is the record of the private adventurers who seem to be turning the South Pole into another Mt Everest. In the summer of 1998-99 five expeditions, including Peter Hillary's Icetrek, hauled sledges to the South Pole navigating their way on five different routes.

Buy Lonely Planet Antartica online

Plane spotters

SPANZ: SOUTH PACIFIC AIRLINES OF NEW ZEALAND AND THEIR DC- 3 VIEWMASTERS
By Richard Waugh and Peter Layne
Craig Printing $39.95 (soft cover) $49.95 (hard cover)
Review: Barbara Harris

Nostalgia time for plane spotters with this history of the innovative little airline that had a short life but is fondly remembered by so many.

In an era when the National Airways Corporation sniffed contemptuously at the idea of tourism Spanz took to the air on December 14, 1960, aiming to open up new commuter routes and to attract tourists.

Crowds would gather and pipe bands would herald a noisy welcome when the Viewmasters, with their specially designed panoramic windows, landed at small town fields as well as at cities.

It was also the first to provide in-flight food - soup in winter, cherries if you were on the Alexandra run.

But it was tough going and the people's airline with its band of small shareholders even had to hold working bees to clean the planes.

It gamely fought on until 1966 when its debts and the NAC monopoly finally grew too great. Its last flight was on February 28, 1966.

Crammed full of information this is an earnest endeavour and one for aircraft enthusiasts.

*Craig Printing PO Box 99, Invercargill.

Fish at your feet

MR EXPLORER DOUGLAS
By John Pascoe, revised by Graham Langton
Canterbury University Press $39.95
Review: Colin Moore

The Rock fishers' adage, fish at your feet first, has something of a parallel in travel. There's the old "don't leave home until you've seen the country" plea, which seems reasonable advice given the way so many young people flee these shores without first checking out what they are leaving behind.

But a closer parallel might be to suggest that travellers should explore an area, wherever it might be, in a bit more depth than the American tourist at the entrance to the Louvre who told his friend "you do that side and I'll do this side."

Charlie Douglas did both sides of his particular Louvre again and again, and with an uncanny and zealous eye for detail.

Douglas arrived in New Zealand from Scotland in 1862 at the age of 22 after a brief career as a bank clerk. He wandered with the gold seekers in Otago for a few years until moving to the West Coast in 1867. He never left.

But for nearly 50 years Douglas explored, sketched and painted the river valleys, glaciers and mountain passes of South Westland.

Although untrained as a surveyor, Douglas worked - was sponsored by may be a more apt description - as an "explorer" for the Government survey department. His role was to fill in the detail of the crude land maps of the time.

With his genius for observation he noted every rock outcrop, stream, river and knoll in the most rugged terrain in New Zealand. He lived simply, mostly in a batwing tent, with few personal possessions.

But he meticulously chronicled his observations of his surroundings - and his reflections on the perfidy of humankind, which he studiously avoided.

His observations were acute and often in advance of his time. Here is Douglas writing in 1892 of a visit to the Copland River: "Years ago the Karangaroa and other rivers in South Westland were celebrated for their ground birds, no prospector need carry meat with him ...

"But the digger with his dogs, cats, rats, ferrets and guns have nearly exterminated the birds in the lower reaches of the southern rivers."

Douglas died in 1916, a legend in Westland. His extraordinary life and his manuscripts were brought to a wider public by mountaineer and historian John Pascoe who spent several years tracking down Douglas' writings and sketches.

His resulting book Mr Explorer Douglas was published in 1957 and reprinted in 1969. Graham Langton, another historian and mountaineer has revised the Pascoe classic for the Canterbury University Press. It remains essentially Charlie Douglas, a traveller of immense vision who always fished at his feet first.

Buy Mr Explorer Douglas online

Welcome Sortie

STEWART ISLAND: A RAKIURA RAMBLE
By Neville Peat
University of Otago Press, $19.95
Review: Colin Moore

As Stewart Island will soon be a national park, the first guide book in many years to this area is particularly welcome.

Peat is one of the country's best natural history writers and his guide is packed with lots of useful information.

Re-born to be wild

GREAT ESCAPES
By Peter Mitchell
Longacre Press $34.95
Review: Bob Irvine

The downside to commuting by motorcycle is that after a night shift I can't semi-doze on the route home the way you do in a car. Bikes demand attention - and reward in return.

Fellow born-again biker Peter Mitchell distils the rawness and fun factor of two-wheel transport more elegantly in his guide to motorcycle touring in New Zealand.

He quotes blind author Helen Keller ("Life is either a daring adventure or nothing") and Robert Pirsig, who wrote the "bible," Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ("On a cycle you are in the scene, not just watching it anymore.")

Mitchell has produced a wonderful introduction to that scene, featuring 46 runs ranging from a few hours to several days. Each is rated by Grin Factor, and seductively laid out with a map, description and time, historical notes, tourism centre addresses, accommodation and handy stops from museums to fish'n'chip shops.

The guide is pitched at a know-nothing tourist level and each run is set out as self-contained - which entails clunky repetition of slabs of text. But Mitchell also taps members of the Ulysses Motorcycle Club (motto: Grow Old Disgracefully - though not quite as disgracefully as their compatriots the Rusty Nuts) to furnish gems for the Kiwi rider.

To make it even more comprehensive there are essays on safe riding (six pages), accommodation and bikes, club and hire agencies, even weather (four pages, with a lesson in reading isobar maps).

When I fire up the geriatric Beemer for my long-cherished tour of the Mainland in February (a well-worn route known as the Old Fart's Tour of the South Island) this thoroughly useful book will be in my tankbag.

"I want it back," the travel editor had said.

Sadly for him, "want" and "get" can be an awful distance apart.

Buy Great Escapes online

The rush is not quite on

EXTREME NZ
By Alison Dench,
New Holland $24.95
Review: Colin Moore

Perhaps it had to happen. A guidebook for adrenalin junkies. Just who would travel New Zealand clutching a thrillseekers' guide is questionable.

And just how "death defying" it is to swim with dolphins is questionable too.

When so-called extreme activities are commercialised a lot of effort goes in to totally defy the death part. But there is no doubt that it is thrilling to tandem paraglide, for instance. Or to raft a grade four rapid, or to ride the Shotover Jet. Those activities can have you panting as though you have just dived into a cold stream. A rush of adrenalin, perhaps.

I'm not so sure about the luge at Rotorua. The biggest thrill I always get from that is kicking the butt of my cocky young children. And riding in a hot air balloon is one of the great sensations you can have, though unless you have a pathological fear of heights the feeling is likely to be more sensuous than scary.

So I have to wonder whether the effort expended on this guide might have been better spent on a lavishly-illustrated coffee table style book. But stand by to see young guests arrive at backpacker lodges and youth hostels up and down the country clutching their guide to extreme New Zealand.

Buy Extreme New Zealand online