Travellers' ChecksAttenborough’s adventures with armadillos and other far-flung travels with animals feature in new book
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Early in his career, David Attenborough travelled the world in search of exotic animals and birds to take back to London Zoo. He filmed his adventures for a popular BBC television series, called Zoo Quest, which ran from 1954 to 1963, and from the second series onwards, he wrote a book to accompany each expedition.
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An excerpt from Zoo Quest in Paraguay (1959), offering a lighthearted look at airfreighting armadillos out of South America, opens a new book called Beastly Journeys: Unusual Tales of Travel with Animals (Bradt Travel Guides). Subsequent writings span about 150 years, from Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey in southern France, to ultramarathon runner Dion Leonard and Gobi, the feisty stray dog who became his running mate in the Gobi Desert (the pair now live in Scotland).
Other companion creatures include llamas, cats, elephants, parrots and tear-jerking YouTube sensation Christian the Harrods-bought lion.
Well-known contributing writers include Gerald Durrell (in an excerpt from The Whispering Land [1961]), Dervla Murphy (Eight Feet in the Andes: Travels with a Mule in Unknown Peru [1983]) and Mark Shand (Travels on My Elephant [1991]).
Beastly Journeys can be previewed and bought at Amazon.co.uk, as can Zoo Quest in Colour (2016), a DVD featuring long-lost and previously unseen original colour footage of Attenborough’s far-flung travels in search of rare and exotic species.