Best Hiking & Camping Excursion Guides

Experience Maori culture, be wowed by beautiful glaciers or hike through gorgeous scenery; all with your trusted travel companion. Colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - Maori culture, history, cuisine, arts, music, landscape, wildlife Free, convenient pull-out touring map (included in print version), plus over 90 maps Covers Auckland, Bay of Islands, Coromandel Peninsula, Central Plateau, Rotorua, East Coast, Wellington, Marlborough, West Coast, Christchurch, Dunedin, Queenstown, Fiordland, Southland and more. Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"We found this book is pretty heavy on "commercial amusements for tourists", less so on other attractions."
"This book was the end-all-be-all for references and recommendations in New Zealand."
"Or vice versa, make the descriptions link to the point of interest on the appropriate map."
"Very informative, with up to date information and good recommendations on activities, restaurants, etc."
"The book arrived and its amazing how much has changed in it over the copy I already had."
"Incredibly helpful in planning my trip to New Zealand."
"Provides most of the necessary information."
"We stuck mostly to the book and had an amazing trip."

Emma Gatewood was the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times and she did it all after the age of 65. Journalist Montgomery draws on interviews with Gatewood’s surviving family members and hikers she met on her five-month journey as well as news accounts and Gatewood’s diaries to offer a portrait of a determined woman, whose trek inspired other hikers and brought attention to the neglect of the Appalachian Trail. Maps of the trail and photos from Gatewood’s early life enhance this inspiring story. “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk is sure to fuel not only the dreams of would-be hikers, but debates on the limits of endurance, the power of determination, and the nature of myth.” —EARL SWIFT, AUTHOR OF THE BIG ROADS.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The book alternates between the story of Gatewood's life from the time she was married to an abusive husband until the time she started her "walk" with the story of her time on the trail. She not only hiked the AT three times (twice as a through hiker and once in segments), but she also hiked the Oregon Trail and helped to create a trail system in her native Ohio."
"Grandma Gatewood went out to "take a walk" dressed in dungarees and tennis shoes with a small drawstring sack containing a shower curtain, a warm coat, a pocket knife, a flashlight and a few snacks. Ben Montgomery, staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times, brings Grandma Gatewood to life in beautifully written and meticulous detail, not only following her perilous walk, but lush in description of the countryside around her, from amazing vistas on the tops of the many mountains she climbed, to the freezing cold, treacherous rock and storms that nearly took her life."
"What is there about little old ladies that they seem to get typecast in our minds, and then when an author like Ben Montgomery tells her story we are gobsmacked by this woman, and her life. And you think, “You GO, girl!”. For the trek, of course, she wore pants — dungarees — but still, those tennis shoes, and carried her supplies in a drawstring sack she made herself. She stuffed in a warm coat, a shower curtain to keep the rain off, some drinking water, a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, candy mints and her pen and a little Royal Vernon Line memo book that she had bought for twenty-five cents at Murphy’s back home.""
"I loved the fact that Grandma Gatewood did not let the horrible circumstances of her married life interfere with her present and future, but set out to accomplish an extraordinary journey that gave her peace in her heart and mind."

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Following the search party&'s retrievals of the bodies, the questions deepen when the victims are discovered, insufficiently dressed for the frigid weather, shoeless, with violent injuries, including a horrible skull fracture, a leg torn away, and a tongue ripped out. A rescue team found their bodies weeks later, nearly a mile from their campsite, partially clothed, shoeless, three of them having died from injuries that indicated a physical confrontation. Drawing on interviews with people who knew the hikers (and with the lone survivor of the expedition, who’d had to turn back due to illness), Russian case documents, and the hikers’ own diaries, Eichar, an American documentarian, re-creates the ill-fated expedition and the investigation that followed.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The Dyatlov Pass incident is always cited as one of the great unsolved mysteries, and so I was excited when my wife gave me "Dead Mountain: The untold Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident" as a gift."
"A group of experienced hikers make camp, then suddenly in the night, for no apparent reason, cut their way out of their tent, charge off into the frozen mountains half dressed and shoeless, run hundreds of meters from their tent, and die. It's close to unheard of behavior. It makes it more fun to both discover what happened, and to discover how we discover what happened (assuming that makes sense). While, as a theory, it makes a heck of a lot more sense than UFOs or mountain elves, it was presented with little lead in, no experimentation whatsoever, and nothing but some conversations with a scientist or two and lots of speculation."
"Well this is really two books: the story of the 9 hikers who died in the Dyatlov pass in February 1959, and Donnie Eichar's trip to Russia in 2012, where he pretty much retraced the steps of the Dyatlov party into the Ural mountains. This sound supposedly frightened them so much that these experienced, tough, capable hikers abandoned their tent in -40 degree Fahrenheit temperatures with a 40 to 50 mile an hour wind and fled to their deaths, in many cases half clothed and in all cases barefoot. I don't care how much dread or fear infrasonic sound can induce, I seriously doubt all nine of these folks succumbed to a level of panic that caused them to knowingly commit suicide by leaving the tent half clothed and fleeing blindly into the arctic. darkness."
Best Walking

Accompanied by an array of eclectic characters – including a world-champion juggler, a drug dealer, and a sex-starved builder from Minnesota – he takes the reader on a compelling adventure that pushes the limits of both endurance and imagination. During his five months living in the woods, Foskett’s psychological apprehensions are stretched to the limit against the wild elements of nature. His adventure weaves a route through some of America's wildest landscapes and history, and is told with insight, humour and reflection. Amongst the bears, moose and rattlesnakes, climbing to 2000 metres, and countless aches and pains lives the memory of a special journey, the wonderful people who briefly share the experience with you, and the knowledge that lasts long after the final blister has healed. Keith is a perfect walking companion for the ups and downs of the trail – his easy and understated style kept me turning the pages. "This book is for anyone who's ever dreamed about a big adventure, as Fozzie spins a funny, thought-provoking and inspiring tale of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Keith Foskett has hiked over 10,000 miles in recent years and holds a deep respect for the outdoor spaces of this world.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It would be great if everyone could be gifted with the health and ability to pick up for six or more months to pursue such an epic hike. Some of us venture a mile or so up the trail, up the stairs, out of breath, just to get a glimpse of what the author has the health to accomplish and the skill to write so blithely about. Next time you see the middle-aged "out of shape", overweight woman slowing down your thru-hike, keep in mind this may be her dream to just walk that mile, struggle up those stairs, because injury or illness means that is the best she can do."
"I have read several AT books as I plan on doing a couple hundred miles of the trail in summer of 2019 as a 73 year old assistant scoutmaster with 2 complete knee replavemrnts."
"Keith does a great job of combining and balancing personal elements with more descriptive details which provide a sense of the broader experience."
"It was a great pleasure reading about someone chasing a dream, a dream that most of us settle on."
"Like other books about the AT, tedious at times with recording elevation, weather, and campsite changes, this book included more."
"This was an easy to read account of what could have been a long and repetitive hiking story."
"Balancing on Blue conveys the richness, mystery and transformation that comes from long hikes in nature, a pursuit that is perhaps unique in modern life."
"The best part for me is his ability to convey the personalities of his fellow hikers and the friendships created on the trail."
Best Camping

Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded. Though the ‘stranger’ in the title is Knight, one closes the book with the sense that Knight, like all seers, is the only sane person in a world gone insane—that modern civilization has made us strangers to ourselves." —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times "Michael Finkel has done something magical with this profound book… [His] investigation runs deep, summoning…the human history of our own attempts to find meaning in a noisy world."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Not only is this story of Chris Knight one of the most compelling that I have read in some time, but the lengths that you went to, to research his venture into the woods of Maine, to understand him, to get to know him, clearly better than anyone else has, and to represent him with such dignity, astounds me. While some, especially those whose homes were burgled, might still never understand what would cause a person to want to live in such extreme conditions let alone in solitude, far removed from the ‘regular’ world, after reading the book, while I will never spend a night, let alone an hour in the woods, what drew Knight makes sense to me now. It’s not to say that after reading THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS that every reader will feel compelled to pick up and leave their jobs, families, and the comfort of modern society behind, but it sure does offer food for thought."
"Many of us dream of secluding from the busyness of modern living—the fast-paced, noisy, cyclical nature in which life has become; yet many of us do not have the courage or tenacity to pursue such a dream, much less achieve this dream for the amount of time that Knight did. On a practical level, Michael Finkel has written this biographical account excellently."
"I wanted to read this book as the Maine woods have been a part of my life and I was unfamiliar with this story until I saw this book. I realized from the start that at the core of this story was an important topic I already have been worrying about that I feel American society either is unaware of or is purposefully ignoring: the neuro-atypical person and the challenge of how they will live (not thriving but suffering) in modern America. Knight was content and found peace in living that life until he was caught with the help of sophisticated surveillance equipment while robbing food from a nonprofit camp for disabled children (including kids on the Autism Spectrum). The heartbreaking part of this story is that the suffering that Knight endured was due to square pegs not fitting in the round holes of modern American society, his relief and contendedness was found living in isolation in nature, but this is not really allowed in America, and when possible it's only available to those who are able to financially support themselves due to an inheritance or some income stream that they are lucky to find that meshes with their talents and abilities. But this book provides more food for thought, for me at least, than just Knight's hermit years story. I hope this book is a catalyst for Americans to think about this issue, with the rising rates of Autism and mental illness, we have more people this decade than ever before who are not fitting in with the mandatory American public school system and who are not fitting in to work jobs as adults enough to support themselves independently let alone the issue of if a person is happy or content."
Best Outdoor Instructional Guides

Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded. Though the ‘stranger’ in the title is Knight, one closes the book with the sense that Knight, like all seers, is the only sane person in a world gone insane—that modern civilization has made us strangers to ourselves." —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times "Michael Finkel has done something magical with this profound book… [His] investigation runs deep, summoning…the human history of our own attempts to find meaning in a noisy world."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Not only is this story of Chris Knight one of the most compelling that I have read in some time, but the lengths that you went to, to research his venture into the woods of Maine, to understand him, to get to know him, clearly better than anyone else has, and to represent him with such dignity, astounds me. While some, especially those whose homes were burgled, might still never understand what would cause a person to want to live in such extreme conditions let alone in solitude, far removed from the ‘regular’ world, after reading the book, while I will never spend a night, let alone an hour in the woods, what drew Knight makes sense to me now. It’s not to say that after reading THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS that every reader will feel compelled to pick up and leave their jobs, families, and the comfort of modern society behind, but it sure does offer food for thought."
"I wanted to read this book as the Maine woods have been a part of my life and I was unfamiliar with this story until I saw this book. I realized from the start that at the core of this story was an important topic I already have been worrying about that I feel American society either is unaware of or is purposefully ignoring: the neuro-atypical person and the challenge of how they will live (not thriving but suffering) in modern America. Knight was content and found peace in living that life until he was caught with the help of sophisticated surveillance equipment while robbing food from a nonprofit camp for disabled children (including kids on the Autism Spectrum). The heartbreaking part of this story is that the suffering that Knight endured was due to square pegs not fitting in the round holes of modern American society, his relief and contendedness was found living in isolation in nature, but this is not really allowed in America, and when possible it's only available to those who are able to financially support themselves due to an inheritance or some income stream that they are lucky to find that meshes with their talents and abilities. But this book provides more food for thought, for me at least, than just Knight's hermit years story. I hope this book is a catalyst for Americans to think about this issue, with the rising rates of Autism and mental illness, we have more people this decade than ever before who are not fitting in with the mandatory American public school system and who are not fitting in to work jobs as adults enough to support themselves independently let alone the issue of if a person is happy or content."
"Many of us dream of secluding from the busyness of modern living—the fast-paced, noisy, cyclical nature in which life has become; yet many of us do not have the courage or tenacity to pursue such a dream, much less achieve this dream for the amount of time that Knight did. On a practical level, Michael Finkel has written this biographical account excellently."
"My heart goes out to Mr. Knight."