thebicyclediaries

**The Best Travel Books of 2022**
From the latest tales of a TV legend to inspiring fictional adventures, these are the top travel books of 2022, and the perfect Christmas gift for the travel lover in your life. [Read more…]

**Best Travel Books of 2022, by Fifty Grande**. These 2022 releases will entertain, inspire and guide you — or the travel fan on your holiday list — out the door to see the world with new eyes. [Read more…]

The Best Travel Books of the Year – and just in time for winter! [Read more…]

**SHORTLISTED for the 2023 Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year award.** The winner, announced on March 24th, 2023, was *In the Shadow of the Mountain* by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado.

**Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Books About Travel of 2022**. Here are ten travel book releases from 2022 that are inspiring us to dust off our passports and experience new locales, alongside the people who make them unforgettable. [Read more…]

Rebecca’s odyssey in *The Slow Road to Tehran* unfolds with flashes of brilliant writing sparkling amongst vivid and humorous tales from the road. [Listen here…]

**The Gateway: A Podcast from the Middle East**. This week we are joined by Rebecca Lowe, a journalist who has written a book on her experience of cycling to Tehran. [Listen here…]

**Times Radio interview with Mariella Frostrup** [Listen here…]

‘A funny and freewheeling account … Lowe, a freelance British journalist, has a forthright confidence that brings to mind those earlier Middle Eastern adventurers Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell.’ [Read more….]

**‘Beautifully capturing the joys of solo adventuring** … highly entertaining and impressively valiant.’ [Read more…]

‘The Slow Road to Tehran is a major achievement, insightful throughout and held together by the gripping plotline of Lowe’s travels . . . This is modern travel writing at its very best, full of vim and vigour, painstakingly researched, laced with wry humour, political . . . adventurous and rich with anecdote.’ [Read more…]

**Eight Travel Books to Read on Vacation This Summer**. When reporting on Lebanon’s 2014 refugee crisis, London-based writer Rebecca Lowe drew one important conclusion: “Never trust people who say things can’t be done.” Such can-do spirit suffuses her new book… [Read more…]

The Slow Road to Tehran: this is ‘modern travel writing at its best’. The British journalist describes her year-long, 11,000km trip on a bicycle she names ‘Maud’ [Read more…]

**Billed as a revelatory bike ride through Europe and the Middle East, Lowe’s adventure from London to Tehran is not a typical tale of endurance.** Nor is Lowe an avid cyclist; instead, she is a perceptive writer who finds new ways to think about the complex peoples, histories and politics of the countries she journeys through [Read more…]

**Going Places: 10 Inspirational Female Adventurers**. To mark International Women’s Day on Tuesday, these great women offer inspiration on how to power up your own adventures [Read more…]

Notes from an Author: Rebecca Lowe on Iran’s compelling contradictions
A 7,000-mile journey of discovery through the Middle East by bike reveals a region of stark contradictions, notably on the road to Tehran [Read more…]

You will have heard the phrase ‘achieving peace in the Middle East’, often an analogy for an intractable problem. Anyone reading Rebecca Lowe’s The Slow Road to Tehran will have a better understanding of the challenges in the area, although they may not be any closer to realising that peace. VERDICT: 9/10 [Read more…]

**In 2015, Rebecca Lowe set out on a year long cycling trip from London to Tehran**, a journey that revealed a splintered mosaic of cultures, countries and languages, each with their own unique traditions. We talked about the Arab Spring, the promise of Sudan, and the stark cultural divides within cosmopolitan Iran [Listen here…]

This is absolutely the best type of travel writing – engaging, humorous, vibrant and packed with historical and cultural detail […] I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys immersive and engaging travel writing – there’s lots here of interest and Lowe is a witty and knowledgeable guide through it all. I defy anyone to read this without being seriously impressed by Lowe![Read more…]

**This is a brilliant travel adventure that scratches so far beneath the surface it might have struck oil.** Rebecca Lowe’s rich knowledge of the Middle East is fascinating enough in itself to keep the pages turning, but add to that a rookie cyclist going for a risk-filled 11,000km ride to Iran and the results are not only culturally enlightening but hilarious. [Read more…]

**A Way With Words:** Not many people can say they’ve cycled 11,000km, stopping only to sleep. Less so solo, from London to Tehran. Rebecca Lowe chronicled this journey in her entertaining, educational and adventurous book, *The Slow Road to Tehran*. [Read more…]

**Rebecca Lowe’s first book, The Slow Road to Tehran paints a living portrait of the Middle East** through its people, politics and historic relationship with the West, and challenges much of the perceived wisdom about this region of the world [Listen here…]

Joining me today is Rebecca Lowe and we’re talking about The Slow Road to Tehran, her debut book. Don’t let the “Slow” in its title fool you. It is a fast-paced book, one that is also full of humor and insight [Listen here…]

**In 2015, Rebecca Lowe decided to bike from her home in London to Tehran, Iran**. When she announced the decision to her family and friends, most thought she’d gone mad. But she went anyway and survived to write a book about her adventure. The World’s Shirin Jaafari spoke with Lowe about her new book, “Slow Road to Tehran.” [Listen here…]

Is it foolish for a woman to cycle alone across the Middle East?

When Rebecca Lowe set off solo from the UK for Iran by bicycle, her friends thought she had taken leave of her senses. But although she had to endure gropers, extreme heat and heavy-handed police, most of the people she met were a long way removed from stereotypes [Read more…]

In pictures: How one woman cycled from London to Iran

Rebecca Lowe’s friends thought she had taken leave of her senses when she set off on an 11,000km, year-long cycle from the UK to Iran. Her article for the BBC News website attracted a huge amount of interest from readers. Here she tells the story of her journey in pictures [Read more…]

I cycled to Iran and found a warm, hospitable country – but women’s rights has a long way to go

‘Iran is a prison,’ the woman told me as she showed me around her small, sparsely decorated flat. ‘Women have no value here. I desperately want to leave, but I can’t.’ [Read more…]

Cycling the Middle East: the kindness of strangers and the desperation of refugee camps

I’m very much of the Ranulph Fiennes school of thought: “plod forever” and take one step at a time. I began my trip on 29 July last year from my flat in London. I’ve now made it to Jordan, via France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Turkey and Lebanon. [Read more…]

The virtues (and hardships) of travel journalism.

Six months ago, I was a full-time journalist in the City, doing a job that I loved. I specialised in international justice and the law, and enjoyed considerable freedom to choose my own stories and travel [Read more…]

I Biked Through Albania. Alone. As a Woman [read more…]

Many people in the West have Iran pegged as a ‘hostile country’. But here British adventurer Rebecca Lowe reveals that when she visited Iran last year as part of a journey by bicycle across Europe and the Middle East she discovered a people genuinely curious about Britain [read more…]