Böcker av Anne Mustoe

It was a blustery April morning on the Thames Embankment in London when Anne Mustoe set out on a phenomenal lone cycle ride - to the original site of Cleopatra's Needle at Heliopolis in Egypt. Leaving behind home comforts, she set herself the challenge of travelling close to water wherever possible - via the Seine and the Rhone, then alongside the Burgundy canal, the Po and the Venetian Lagoon. Before she would reach her final waterway - the evocative Nile - Ms Mustoe would encounter the dusty yet beguiling Near East: Turkey, Syria, the Lebanon and finally Egypt itself. Anne Mustoe weaves a story of exquisite detail laced with the understated humour that has become her hallmark.

In her brand-new travelogue, intrepid ex-headmistress and bestselling author Anne Mustoe dusts off the bicycle clips once more and embarks on a remarkable journey through South America. Following in the bike tracks of Che Guevara, Anne retraces the route this iconic revolutionary figure once tread, as documented in the famous Motorcycle Diaries. A second route takes her to Potosi, the highest city in the world, as she travels to the Mountain of Silver. Beautifully written and wonderfully evocative, Che Guevara and the Mountain of Silver charts an epic journey by bike and train through South America's most colourful and historically interesting areas.

India is no place for the faint-hearted cyclist. The streets are jammed with cars, busses, rickshaws, animals, fortune-tellers, barbers, beggars and people sleeping or cooking. Following the success of her two previous outings, A Bike Ride and Lone Traveller, adventuresome ex-headmistress Anne Mustoe donned the cycle helmet once more and set out on an exhilarating journey round the Indian subcontinent. Beginning in Kathmandu in Nepal and ending in the tranquil hill town of Kandy in Sri Lanka, Anne's amazing journey is told with keen observation and the relish of the open road.

Myriad wonderful characters populate the pages of Anne Mustoe's fascinating book as she pedals along three very different, but equally evocative, roads - the Amber Route from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the Santa Fe Trail from the Missouri River to New Mexico and the Pilgrims' Way of St James from Le Puy to Santiago de Compostela. Battling against ferocious winds in Jutland, blizzards in the Rockies, traffic jams of cyclists along the Danube and menus in Czech, Hungarian and Basque, Mustoe survives with her usual fortitude and wry humour, even when she is knocked off her bike by a short-sighted nonagenarian in a Fiat Panda.

'You don't have to be twenty, male and an ace mechanic to set out on a great journey. I've cycled round the world twice now. I'm not young, I'm not sporty, I never train and I still can't tell a sprocket from a chainring or mend a puncture.'So speaks Anne Mustoe in the opening to this fascinating record of her second epic journey cycling around the globe from East to West. Using historical routes as her inspiration, Anne followed the ancient Roman roads to Lisbon, travelled across South America with the Conquistadors, pursued Captain Cook over the Pacific to Australia and Indonesia and followed the caravans along the fabled Silk Road from Xi'an to Rome.

When ex-headmistress Anne Mustoe gave up her job, bought a bike and took to the road, she couldn't even mend a puncture. 12,000 miles and 15 months later, she was home. Her epic solo journey took her around the world, through Europe, India, the Far East and the United States. From Thessaloniki to Uttar Pradesh, from Chumphon to Singapore, she faced downpours, blizzards and blistering deserts, political turmoil and amorous waiters - alternated with great kindness from strangers along the way. A Bike Ride is the first in the series of Anne Mustoe's successful and inspiring travelogues.