20 must-do Adventures on Earth - new ebook goes live

Ahem. Drum roll, please. If you read last week's blog post, you'd have seen the video clip preview. Now - cue the butterflies, the rose petals, the biodegradable confetti - I'm quietly thrilled to announce that my first ebook just went live on iTunes. Yay!

Adventures on Earth is a multi-touch ebook (as opposed to a text-only ebook), a 135-page feast for the eyes and mind, with more than 300 images, a few video clips and 20 of my best travel stories about dream destinations I've been fortunate to visit over the past few years.

Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction:

"In the following pages you’ll read about treks in Mongolia and California and others in Madagascar, New Zealand’s Southern Alps and the almost-forgotten kingdom of Mustang in Nepal; about sea kayaking in Papua New Guinea as well as in the Arctic, the Philippines and Panama.

Trekking magical Mongolia

"There are stories about wish-list destinations I’d always longed to see and now can’t wait to return to: expedition cruises to Antarctica, the Galapagos and Kamchatka in the Russian Far East, the high-altitude train ride to Tibet, a road trip in Bhutan. 

"And a few short pieces (in the Short Cuts chapter) on rafting Tasmania’s wild Franklin River, camping in Cambodia and paddling Kauai’s Na Pali coast.

A boy monk in Bhutan

"It’s as much a photoessay as it is an anthology, with each travel tale accompanied by my own images – because it was travel photography that catapulted me into the world of travel writing and because, for me, photos are an integral part of “bringing back the story”." [Click here for a selection of images from the book.]

Galapagos sea lion, in situ

Ebooks look easy to create. And in a way they are, but they take time, much of it spent learning how to drive the technology, which is quite a ride.

Producing this one has taken the best part of a year, between travels and deadlines, but has been one of the most enjoyable projects of my writing life: selecting and editing the stories, sorting through hundreds of images to find my favourite 300 or so, learning how to use iBooks Author, negotiating the labyrinthine iBooks ecosystem.

Big thanks to Angie and Kristian Hagen at Creative Lot for designing a beautiful cover that conveys spaciousness and wanderlust in equal doses.

And thanks to you for sharing this moment with me - as I write to you from a hotel room in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. Let's sit back and watch the preview video together one more time (it's my first video clip too). Hope you enjoy the adventures, let me know what you think - and let others know too, by writing a review on iTunes if you feel so inclined...

Adventures on Earth is available on iTunes and the iBooks Store for $9.99 in Australia (and similar amounts in 50 other countries). Click here to see the preview on iTunes.