Armchair Travel

Wanna travel but can't right now?
Sometimes planning a trip or reading about far away places is almost as good.

Pop down to your local library and peruse the travel section, or even better, the travel writing section. That's where people have gone on trips, sometimes epic journeys, and wrote about it all.
The beauty of armchair travel is that you are probably very comfortable and it only costs as much as petrol to the library, snacks while you read and the power for your reading light.

If you'd like to read about places in New Zealand, check out the NZ Herald's Destination New Zealand section. They highlight the distant and the pedestrian places of Aotearoa NZ.

NPR's audio programme and reviews on Books for Armchair Travel and Adventure has several options you might want to explore.

It's cheap and comfortable and you don't have to send postcards!

One of my favourite reads is On Mexican Time by Tony Cohan. He's followed it up with a new one! Cheaper than a trip to Mexico what with airfares, visas, vaccinations . . . .

Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico
by Tony Cohan

Tony Cohan's On Mexican Time, his chronicle of discovering a new life in the small Mexican mountain town of San Miguel de Allende, has beguiled readers and become a travel classic. Now, in Mexican Days, point of arrival becomes point of departure as--faced with the invasion of the town by tourists and an entire Hollywood movie crew, a magazine editor's irresistible invitation, and his own incurable wanderlust--Cohan undertakes a richer, wider exploration of the country he has settled in. Told with the intimate, sensuous insight and broad sweep that captivated readers of On Mexican Time, Mexican Days is set against a changing world as Cohan encounters surprise and adventure in a Mexico both old and new: among the misty mountains and coastal Caribbean towns of Veracruz; the ruins and resorts of Yucatan; the stirring indigenous world of Chiapas; the markets and galleries of Oaxaca; the teeming labyrinth of Mexico City; the remote Sierra Gorda mountains; the haunted city of Guanajuato; and the evocative Mayan ruins of Palenque. Along the way he encounters expatriates and artists, shady operatives and surrealists, and figures from his past.

More than an immensely pleasurable and entertaining travel narrative by one of the most vivid, compelling travel voices to emerge in recent years, Mexican Days is both a celebration of the joys and revelations to be found in this inexhaustibly interesting country.