Mike Gerrard's travel writing has won awards in the UK and USA, and been published in The Times, Time Out, The Washington Post, Wanderlust, The Independent on Sunday, The Express, The Sydney Sun-Herald, The Guardian, and many other publications. In this collection of his travel writing, his award-winning pieces about eating snake in China, taking a taxi ride through troubled Belfast, and walking the hair-raising levadas of Madeira are all included. Also here are other evocative accounts of his experiences: * camel-trekking in the Sinai Desert * helping to drink a bar dry in Guyana * dodging orangutan dung in Sumatra * canoeing in Venezuela's Orinoco Delta * touring Paris at night on a bike * discovering Viking toilet habits * going to a country that doesn't exist And capturing the atmosphere of Jamaica, the South Pacific, Armenia, Georgia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Athens in these 56 travel pieces, amounting to 71,000 words over 250 pages. Julia-Jean Andrews on Smashwords: "I've always enjoyed a good travel book and this is one of the best. You can dip into individual chapters and let Mike Gerrard take you around the world. I also enjoyed how Mike describes the various local foods...Well...Apart from the snake " And from 5-star reviews in the Amazon UK store: By Andrew (London) - A wonderfully varied array of trips and holidays come vividly to life in this collection. They cover the world and include a whole spectrum of contrasting places and experiences. Mike Gerrard writes about all of them with compassion, humour and insight from his own first-hand knowledge. The writing is a real pleasure to read, too. By Kate Nivison (London) - I would thoroughly recommend Mike Gerrard's 'Snakes Alive' collection of his own lively and much-published travel features to anyone who would love to travel more, or wants to write about their own experience. Many of the pieces are object lessons in how to capture the spirit of a place without hype or exaggeration, in an accessible and fluent style. As well as inspiration, there are also plenty of down-to-earth details for the would-be traveller. As a travel writer myself, (Travelling Light: Short Stories & Travel Writing to Take You Away From it All ) and where my own travels have corresponded with Mike Gerrard's (Sinai, Jamaica, France . . .) I found myself nodding and smiling at the truth of his observations.