Mark Elliott

                 Travel Writer

                         presenter, teacher, editor,                                                        tour guide, and leading                                                            Azerbaijan specialist.

 

Guidebooks

I am probably best known for my 'cult' backpacker guides Asia Overland and Southeast Asia Graphic guide, plus my series of books on Azerbaijan (scroll down for details). But I have also contributed to dozens of travel guidebooks for Lonely Planet covering destinations as diverse as Iran and Indonesia, Bosnia and Belgium, Greenland and Kashmir. Click below for plenty more about these...

 

 

Commercial copy & editing work

I have considerable experience editing and reworking commercial copy for corporate clients especially in Azerbaijan. I have written many magazine articles and occasional newspaper pieces focussed on travel.

Tour Guiding

I have worked as a tour guide for Inghams Travel (in France & Spain) and Saga Holidays (UK). In Azerbaijan I helped train local city guides and I offer my own bespoke tours by request. 


Tour-guide coaching in Baku

Training prospective tour guides in Baku, 2017

TV & Speeches

I have made countless speeches and talks focussing mostly on  travel and I present a small but growingseries of documentaries for Visions TV. On the technical side I studied Radio & TV production at Bath University, and in Tennessee on a Rosenblum TV video 'boot camp'.

Adventures

When not travelling for work, I travel for pleasure. In West Africa I spent five months living in a village of 42 houses learning from the 'witch doctors' on an ethnobotanical project. In 1989 I 'joined' the Velvet Revolution in Prague. I've walked in the rainforest with Borneo Dayaks. My adventures in Cameroon were featured in Belle Aurore's 'Intrepid Africa' while my tale of getting marooned in ice off Greenland appears in the Lonely Planet book 'Middle of Nowhere'.

 

Teaching

I have a PGCE teacher training qualification for secondary science, specialising in chemistry.

I have also taught English as foreign language in the Czech Republic (when it was still known as Czechoslovakia)and for three years in rural Japan as part of the JET Programme. 


 

         Azerbaijan

Since 1998 I have been the author of the definitive guidebook to Azerbaijan - now in its 5th edition. I present documentaries on Az travel, advise local tour agencies and am working on an Az hiking guide.

 

Classics

Asia Overland

Though long out of print, in the late 1990s this brick-thick map-based guide was a cult book for ultra-budget travellers crossing Asia in the pre-internet world. Many of its visa dodging tips saved backpackers a lot of money and trouble then,but would be highly inadvisable 20 years later.

Southeast Asia Graphic Guide

Using a similar 'treasure-map' approach to Asia Overland, this slim but fact filled volume used a novel, highly admired approach that won widely positive reviews and became highly sought after on the backpacker circuit.

there's much more...

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© Copyright Mark Elliott