avg_rating: 4.28
name: Matthew Lightfoot
about: Born with an insatiable wanderlust and inspired by an addiction to travel writing, but restricted by the demands of a full time job, Matthew Lightfoot set out to explore the world using his annual work holiday allowance.His first book,The Two Week Traveller, tells the tales of his adventures in almost 150 countries.Often described as ‘one of those people that things just happen to’, he lives up to his reputation with a collection of humorous, hair-raising and thought-provoking travel tales that span the entire globe over a period of 30 years.Being chased by rogue elephants and robbed at gunpoint by a stoned policeman; accidentally cycling down an airport runway and getting trapped in a voodoo ceremony are the sort of tales Lightfoot vividly Born with an insatiable wanderlust and inspired by an addiction to travel writing, but restricted by the demands of a full time job, Matthew Lightfoot set out to explore the world using his annual work holiday allowance.His first book,The Two Week Traveller, tells the tales of his adventures in almost 150 countries.Often described as ‘one of those people that things just happen to’, he lives up to his reputation with a collection of humorous, hair-raising and thought-provoking travel tales that span the entire globe over a period of 30 years.Being chased by rogue elephants and robbed at gunpoint by a stoned policeman; accidentally cycling down an airport runway and getting trapped in a voodoo ceremony are the sort of tales Lightfoot vividly recounts in the Two Week Traveller.Matthew's second book, Snapshots, describes the round-the-world journey during which he wrote his first book, using thirty years of travel snapshots to jog his memory. His present day adventures take us on a campervan journey across New Zealand, to being castaway on a Fijian Island, then from the mysterious nation of Paraguay, across the countries of the high Andes by bus to South America's Pacific coast. Along the way, a series of long forgotten images lead us on a photographic exploration of the author's past adventures around the world. Lightfoot attracts incidents and his tales embark on a fast-paced tour of the people, history, cultures and eccentricities of cities around the globe, as memories are rekindled through photos appearing randomly on a laptop screen.From Kathmandu to Marrakech and Lapland to Mumbai, Snapshots introduces us to an entertaining cast of Transylvanian wolfmen, child goddesses, murderous street urchins and hairless dogs, as the author dodges international terrorists and Sunday morning rioters, gets slapped by a ghost, drinks narcotic mud from a bucket, and is caught up in a bar brawl between the US Navy and an assembly of dwarves.Matthew Lightfoot's books aim to inform as well as to entertain, and combine richly detailed story telling with evocative descriptions which transport the reader to off-the-beaten-track locations around the globe. His books are for anyone who loves to travel, whether on a two week work break or a round-the-world odyssey, and, most of all, for everyone who knows that the journey is as important as the destination.Facebook page -The Two Week Traveller Book features videos and photos from Matthew's adventures. You can also follow him on Twitter @2WeekTraveller. ...more