Travels On My Elephant

Download or read book Travels on My Elephant written by Mark Shand and published by Eland Pub Limited. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memorable account of a journey across India on an elephant.

Download or read book Travels on My Elephant written by Mark Shand and published by Overlook Books. This book was released on 1998-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the international crusader and spokesman for the Indian elephant, and the subject of two Discovery Channel documentaries, this captivating travel memoir logs Mark Shand's remarkable journey through India on the back of a 30-year-old elephant named Tara.Started on a whim and pursued with a passion, their journey covered 800 miles, from the Bay of Bengal to the world's largest elephant bazaar at Sonpur on the Ganges. Blessed by priests and entertained by princes, they shuffled happily through towns and villages: Tara sucking up rice and bananas from roadside stands and Shand scattering rupees in compensation. All Indian life is here -- scavenging dogs and exquisite temples, jostling crowds and empty wilderness. Rivaling Kipling, this story of man and elephant is by turns exciting, terrifying, and moving.Mark Shand's Travels on My Elephant tells an immediately appealing love story.... With an eye for vivid description and a droll sense of humor reminiscent of Peter Mayle's books about France, Shand tells an entertaining story. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Travels on My Elephant written by Mark Shand and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of one man's adventures with an elephant. There is no better way to see India than on the back of an elephant, which is exactly what Mark Shand discovered as he set out on a 1000 kilometre journey on Tara, a 30-year old female elephant. Their destination was the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant market.

Download or read book Travels written by Michael Crichton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-14 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a deeply personal memoir full of fascinating adventures as he travels everywhere from the Mayan pyramids to Kilimanjaro. Fueled by a powerful curiosity—and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up—Michael Crichton's journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling—swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. This is a record of those travels—an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton's many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.

Download or read book Elephant Complex written by John Gimlette and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one sees the world quite like John Gimlette. As The New York Times once noted, “he writes with enormous wit, indignation, and a heightened sense of the absurd.” Writing for both the adventurer and the armchair traveler, he has an eye for unusually telling detail, a sense of wonder, and compelling curiosity for the inside story. This time, he travels to Sri Lanka, a country only now emerging from twenty-six years of civil war. Delving deep into the nation’s story, Gimlette provides us with an astonishing, multifaceted portrait of the island today. His travels reveal the country as never before. Beginning in the exuberant capital, Colombo (“a hint of anarchy everywhere”), he ventures out in all directions: to the dry zones where the island’s 5,800 wild elephants congregate around ancient reservoirs; through cinnamon country with its Portuguese forts; to the “Bible Belt” of Buddhism—the tsunami-ravaged southeast coast; then up into the great green highlands (“the garden in the sky”) and Kandy, the country’s eccentric, aristocratic Shangri-la. Along the way, a wild and often desperate history takes shape, a tale of great colonies (Arab, Portuguese, British, and Dutch) and of the cultural divisions that still divide this society. Before long, we’re in Jaffna and the Vanni, crucibles of the recent conflict. These areas—the hottest, driest, and least hospitable—have been utterly devastated by war and are only now struggling to their feet. But this is also a story of friendship and remarkable encounters. In the course of his journey, Gimlette meets farmers, war heroes, ancient tribesmen, world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, old planters, survivors of great massacres—and perhaps some of their perpetrators. That’s to say nothing of the island’s beguiling fauna: elephants, crocodiles, snakes, storks, and the greatest concentration of leopards on Earth. Here is a land of extravagant beauty and profound devastation, of ingenuity and catastrophe, possessed of both a volatile past and an uncertain future—a place capable of being at once heavenly and hellish—all brought to vibrant, fascinating life here on the page.

Download or read book The Elephants in My Backyard written by Rajiv Surendra and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rajiv Surendra was filming Mean Girls, playing the beloved rapping mathlete Kevin Gnapoor, when a cameraman insisted he read Yann Martel's Life of Pi. So begins his "lovely and human" (Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy) tale of obsessively pursuing a dream, overcoming failure, and finding meaning in life. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I found myself standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. Far below me was an incredible abyss with no end in sight. I could turn back and safely return to where I had come from, or I could throw caution to the wind, lift my arms up into the air . . . and jump.” —From The Elephants in My Backyard What happens when you spend ten years obsessively pursuing a dream, and then, in the blink of an eye, you learn that you have failed, that the dream will not come true? In 2003, Rajiv Surendra was filming Mean Girls, playing the beloved rapping mathlete Kevin Gnapoor, when a cameraman insisted he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Mesmerized by all the similarities between Pi and himself—both are five-foot-five with coffee-colored complexions, both share a South Indian culture, both lived by a zoo—when Rajiv learns that Life of Pi will be made into a major motion picture he is convinced that playing the title role is his destiny. In a great leap of faith Rajiv embarks on a quest to embody the sixteen-year-old Tamil schoolboy. He quits university and buys a one-way ticket from Toronto to South India. He visits the sacred stone temples of Pondicherry, he travels to the frigid waters off the coast of rural Maine, and explores the cobbled streets of Munich. He befriends Yann Martel, a priest, a castaway, an eccentric old woman, and a pack of Tamil schoolboys. He learns how to swim, to spin wool, to keep bees, and to look a tiger in the eye. All the while he is really learning how to dream big, to fail, to survive, to love, and to become who he truly is. Rajiv Surendra captures the uncertainty, heartache, and joy of finding ones place in the world with sly humor and refreshing honesty. The Elephants in My Backyard is not a journey of goals and victories, but a story of process and determination. It is a spellbinding and profound book for anyone who has ever failed at something and had to find a new path through life.

Download or read book Skulduggery written by Mark Shand and published by Jonathan Cape. This book was released on 1987 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: