Taking the Risk: My adventures in travel and publishing

Taking the Risk is Hilary Bradt's memoir about her 50 years of travel and publishing adventures, including hitchhiking, working abroad, and starting a successful travel publishing company.

Format: Hardback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 01 May 2024
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides

Taking the Risk is Hilary Bradt's captivating, insightful, amusing, and occasionally alarming memoir about her serendipitous adventures in travel and publishing. A trailblazer in the travel industry who co-founded Bradt Guides, Hilary reflects on 50 years of escapades, surprises, mishaps, disasters, and success. From her first solo trip at the age of three (on a British beach), she revisits six decades of hitchhiking, feeding her travel habit by working abroad, and starting a successful travel publishing company where knowing nothing proved a surprising asset. Barely into her twenties, Hilary thumbed lifts around the Middle East for three months before spending four years working and traveling in the US. Between 1973 and 1976, Hilary explored and worked in South America and Africa with her then-husband George, often journeying through literally uncharted territory in their quest to find new hiking routes. The discovery of an ancient trail to Machu Picchu unexpectedly inspired their first guidebook. From 1977, the pair wrote several backpacking guides and set up Bradt Guides. This was just as well, as Hilary's career in occupational therapy ended when potential employers noticed that time taken off for travel exceeded periods of employment. During the 1980s, Bradt Guides grew and became successful - but that didn't stop Hilary traveling, including as a tour leader. Join Hilary as she relives in detail the rigors of travel before the days of the internet or mobile phones, including smuggling her husband across an international border and frequently getting arrested despite efforts to be responsible tourists. Learn how Hilary's lack of experience made the early days of publishing quite unlike those of any other successful publisher. Laugh (or cry) at Hilary's ability to court media disaster.

Weight: 770g
Dimension: 240 x 163 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781804691847