Any woman whose passport has been stamped a few times knows the surest method of keeping her travel fire alive: by reading and telling stories from the road, passing them along like a torch in a relay race.

From Travelers’ Tales comes The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8: True Stories from Around the World—the eighth collection in the annual best-selling, award-winning series that invites readers to ride shotgun alongside intrepid female nomads as they travel the world to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The stories in this year’s edition are as diverse as the geographic locations, the common thread being fresh, compelling storytelling from a woman’s perspective aimed at making readers laugh, weep, wish they were there, or be glad they weren’t.
In The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 8, readers will:

Fend off angry bulls on a mountaintop in Kyrgyzstan
Start a new life in a boat on the Ganges
Climb the Great Wall with a 9-month-old and a 91-year-old
Battle it out with an alter ego in a jungle in Mexico
Learn about survival in a slum in Rio de Janeiro
Walk the Camino de Santiago from France to Spain
Find romance in a strip club in Oman and a boat in Belize
Discover family in Sicily, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Zambia
... and much more.

Lavinia Spalding is the author of "Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler," and coauthor of "With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant." Her work has also appeared in such publications as "Sunset Magazine, Yoga Journal, Inkwell, " and "Post Road Magazine." She grew up in New Hampshire and Flagstaff, Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona creative writing program. She has kept travel journals throughout thirty countries on five continents.