Taking the Risk: my adventures in travel and publishing

by Hilary Bradt

Taking the Risk is Hilary Bradt’s engaging, insightful, amusing and sometimes alarming memoir about serendipitous adventures in travel and publishing. A travel industry trail-blazer who co-founded Bradt Guides, Hilary looks back on 50 years of escapades, surprises, mishaps, disasters… and success. From her first solo trip aged three (on a British beach), she revisits six decades of hitchhiking, feeding the travel habit by working abroad, and starting a successful travel publishing company where knowing nothing proved a surprising asset.

Barely into her twenties, Hilary Bradt thumbed lifts around the Middle East for three months before spending four years working and travelling 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, because 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 travelling, including as a tour leader.

Join Hilary as she relives in detail the rigours 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 disasters while seeking the limelight, including waving around condoms on BBC TV.

Taking the Risk comprises the collected stories of an inveterate, intrepid traveller whose joyous exploration of the world has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people – anyone who has owned a Bradt Guide. A unique book from a unique individual, it will delight anyone who has ever travelled or ever wondered what goes into making the books we read.

423 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2024

Reviews

[Jane Wilson-Howarth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilary Bradt’s latest book documents many of her innumerable unexpected and amusing encounters mostly during the 1970s and 1980s hitching lifts and enjoying the hospitality of strangers as well as almost falling into the business of publishing guides to many of the world’s least travelled regions. There’s even one for Afghanistan.
I so enjoyed Hilary Bradt’s honesty about how she managed to navigate much of South America and other under-resourced parts of the globe and one of her funniest admissions was about how she’d chat up random passengers boarding at Heathrow, persuading people to courier boxes of newly published Bradt guide books across the Atlantic! Her parsimony is impressive, but then Bradt Guides were produced on a shoestring through the generosity of various friends and relations.
There’s lots to entertain and make the reader smile in “Taking the Risk” and it is enjoyable to discover what travel was like before the internet, mobile phones and google translate.
Inveterate traveller Hilary Bradt says “I’ve been getting lost and blaming other people” since the age of three, so how brave is she to have done so many intrepid journeys – often alone – to remote places? I guess her successes stem from her unstinting optimism and her talent for engaging with, and entertaining, whoever she meets.

[MISS N C CODLING · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly entertaining and inspiring

I loved this book from start to finish. From humble beginnings as a fledgling traveller to pioneering adventurer. The tales of mishaps and misadventures along the way were immensely entertaining. The look back at the history of travel guide publishing was insightful and made me wonder at times how Hilary and George managed to do everything on such a shoestring. Hilary is a remarkable woman and this was a joy to read. What a life! Long may she continue her journeys and writing.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the old school travel stories in this. The part about the Anglo Argentinians was especially interesting.
I also found the publishing part really interesting, especially the old school manual cut and pasting

[kathryn chapman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief run through of her life. Lacked any emotional insight.