‘Don’t go,’ warned the military attaché in Lima when he heard the diminutive young traveller’s intention to follow the Amazon from its headwaters in the Andes all the way to the sea. Even in peaceful times it was an extraordinary plan: no woman had ever made such a trip alone. And now, in 1989, there was the added danger of Andean terrorist guerrillas, the Senderos, who had recently targeted gringos in order to sabotage Peru’s tourist industry. But Natascha had dreamt of this journey for as long as she could remember and she certainly didn’t seem to understand the word don’t.
What a wry, sparkling well-informed chronicler of the terrain and its people Natascha turned out to be: no wonder so many Andeans opened their doors to her. Despite set-backs, unthinkable risks, periodic fury – with the donkey and with herself – she walked for three months, following the Marañon river, discovering first-hand the jokes, the fears, the hardships and the pleasures of remote Peruvian lives.
Once in the Amazon lowlands she continued for two more months by a curious variety of rivercraft, staying with missionaries, local settlers and finally with a community of Bora Indians – discovering that tenuous no-man’s land which lies between traditional cultures and the encroaching twentieth century.
The book is at once a disarmingly candid personal record, yet interlaced are the hard facts of this desperate period of hyper-inflation and social chaos in Peru’s history. Natascha draws the characters she encountered with skill and flair yet she never loses sight of the fact that while she is pursuing an adventurous dream, these people are fighting for their very survival.

Formed in Scandinavia and the Baltic States from ancient pine forests, amber has been mined, carved, prized, collected and endowed with healing properties for millennia. Of the ancient trade routes which fan out from the Polish coast, one leads straight through the heart of central and Eastern Europe, across the former Czech Republic, Hungary and Serbia, and through Macedonia to Thessaloniki.
It was this historic route that Natascha Scott-Stokes was inspired to follow in 1992, captivated by the romance of golden amber, and simultaneously drawn to the countries that lie along its path – now in ferment after the opening up of their borders and the collapse of the communist regimes. She set off from Poland by bicycle, travelling with her new husband, the journey taking them south through countryside sometimes unchanged for centuries, elsewhere scarred by industrial wastelands, through medieval villages and reborn capitals. While uncovering the history, mythology and magic of amber, she simultaneously explored the multiplicity of nations and races now responding to a double-edged economic and political awakening. Prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the journey was also in part a personal odyssey, a search for the roots of the author’s own European identity.
Following an ancient trade route into the heart of the most contemporary and turbulent issues facing us today, Natascha Scott-Stokes travelled hopefully, meeting people and emotional responses spanning the whole gamut of contradictory experiences which make up Eastern Europe. It is an experience she describes with humour, freshness and unfailing honesty, and in pursuit of an age-old mystery, she discovered a few of the answers to the continent’s newest questions.

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to travel in Central America this book will really whet your appetite! From smouldering volcanoes to mysterios lakes, from riotous Maya celebrations to obscure African rituals, Natascha Scott-Stokes will take you there, sharing her years of Latin American research and personal experience to create a rich and vivid portrait.

The author not only fell in love with Guatemala, but also with one man in particular. Their meeting was the beginning of an adventure every traveller dreams of, though they soon find out that chasing your dreams in a foreign land is often fraught with danger.

The appearance of the diaries of Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940) in 1980 led to a publishing sensation. They recorded the professional activities and private passions of a Victorian vicar’s daughter from Norfolk (UK) who became one of the foremost entomologists of her day during a long and illustrious career. She was the most famous butterfly collector of her generation, travelling all over the world in order to collect, record and breed them, and was an expert of tropical butterfly life-cycles. She was also an extraordinary fee spirit and great English eccentric.

Although the readers of her journals have been captivated by her unorthodox private life, her importance as a butterfly collector has rarely been acknowledged. Natascha Scott-Stokes draws on the diaries and wealth of new material to tell Margaret’s remarkable story. A passionate lover and fearless individualist, her life was founded upon her idiosyncratic determination to pursue her own path irrespective of convention. Tempestuous love affairs with men aside, she was a pioneering traveller who considered the effects of tourism on native populations during the Edwardian era and developed ideas of sustainable research while others were busy culling species for the world’s museums.