Eric Hansen was the first westerner ever to walk across the island of Borneo. Completely cut off from the outside world for seven months, he traveled nearly 1,500 miles with small bands of nomadic hunters known as Penan. Beneath the rain forest canopy, they trekked through a hauntingly beautiful jungle where snakes and frogs fly, pigs climb trees, giant carnivorous plants eat mice, and mushrooms glow at night. At once a modern classic of travel literature and a gripping adventure story, Stranger in the Forest provides a rare and intimate look at the vanishing way of life of one of the last surviving groups of rain forest dwellers. Hansen's absorbing, and often chilling, account of his exploits is tempered with the humor and humanity that prompted the Penan to take him into their world and to share their secrets.

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo (Penguin Travel Library)

Travel

HANSEN, ERIC

Asia

Penguin??Books

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

This travelogue begins with the terrifying account of the storm that left Eric Hansen and four companions shipwrecked on a deserted Red Sea island. Rescued by smugglers and taken to the Yemen coast, Hansen found himself increasingly enthralled by this little-known land, intrigued by its customs, charmed by its natural beauty and captivated by its people as he travelled the country, seeking out its wildest geography and rarest wildlife while searching for a way to retrieve the travel journals he lost in the shipwreck. A humorous mix of reportage, comedy and tension, this is a glimpse into a country insufficiently understood by the West, and into a culture at once secretive and friendly, alien and enchanting.

Motoring with Mohammed / Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea

Houghton Mifflin, 1991

Motoring with Mohammed

Middle East

Time Warner Books Uk

Eric Hansen is an intrepid traveler with a keenly perceptive eye and an appreciation for the odd and unusual. He will go anywhere and try anything. Through it all he manages to capture the most revealing conversations and the most transporting moments in his travels, from the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Borneo and far beyond. Hansen writes about the mind-altering experience of drinking kava in Vanuatu and about heartrending moments working at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. He joins a grieving husband searching for his dead wife’s wedding ring at a crash site in the Borneo rain forest. He recounts his miraculous survival of Cyclone Tracy on a fishing boat off the north coast of Australia, and he befriends an elderly Russian woman who would prepare catered dinners for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky in her tiny Manhattan kitchen while drug dealers were shot to death in the downstairs lobby. He spends time with an ornithologist who studies endangered ants and the sex lives of banana slugs—and takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions. Each essay is a passionate experience of life refracted through the eyes and voice of a singularly evocative and original writer.

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers

Travel Writing

Pantheon

Vintage

The author recounts his seven-month, three-thousand-mile walk across Borneo, through untamed jungle where the only inhabitants are the descendants of headhunters, and offers a comparison between life in the jungle and civilization

Houghton/Mifflin

Ten years after being shipwrecked on North Yemen the author returns to recover the notebooks he buried for safekeeping, rediscovering the rich and exotic culture of Yemen with his guide Mohammed

Motoring With Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea

Biographies & Memoirs

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

A seductive journey into the obsessive, outrageous, and mesmerizing world of orchids. From the steaming jungles of Borneo to the hallowed hallways of Kew Gardens, from the clandestine orchid nurseries of Europe to the peat bogs of northern Minnesota, here are luscious, sexy flowers, orchid smugglers, fist-fighting botanists, moths with twelve-inch-long tongues, and government officials who raid orchid nurseries with attack dogs and automatic weapons. Strange tales of insect pollinator fidelity, the orchid ice cream makers of eastern Turkey, and man-crushing killer orchids weighing half a ton are blended with stories about a wide range of gentle people whose passion in life is the creation of scented, fragile flowers. Eric Hansen spent seven years exploring the far corners of the earth -- marveling at flowers of uncommon beauty, studying the history of the orchid trade, and grappling with the vicious, bizarre, and petty world of plant politics that sometimes makes it impossible to protect endangered species. Hansen brings to life the colorful flowers and the even more colorful people who are attracted to them, as he illuminates a funny, weird, and poignant world of horticultural passion and pathos.

Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

In 1978 Eric Hansen found himself shipwrecked on a desert island in the Red Sea. When goat smugglers offered him safe passage to Yemen, he buried seven years' worth of travel journals deep in the sand and took his place alongside the animals on a leaky boat bound for a country that he'd never planned to visit. As he tells of the turbulent seas that stranded him on the island and of his efforts to retrieve his buried journals when he returned to Yemen ten years later, Hansen enthralls us with a portrait -- uncannily sympathetic and wildly offbeat -- of this forgotten corner of the Middle East. With a host of extraordinary characters from his guide, Mohammed, ever on the lookout for one more sheep to squeeze into the back seat of his car, to madcap expatriates and Eritrean gun runners- and with landscapes that include cities of dreamlike architectural splendor, endless sand dunes, and terrifying mountain passes, Hansen reveals the indelible allure of a land steeped in custom, conflicts old and new, and uncommon beauty.

Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HANSEN, ERIC. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HANSEN, ERIC

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HANSEN, ERIC. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo (Penguin Travel Library)

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

Motoring with Mohammed / Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea

Motoring with Mohammed

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

Motoring With Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea

Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy

Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea