Smiling kiddies from Alison's trip to Madagascar

The smiliest second-hand travellers bookshop this side of Africa

UsedTravelBooks.com.au is a boutique online secondhand travel bookshop in Newtown, Sydney. Our forte is rare and offbeat used travel books for fellow travel bugs.

We stock cheap and rare used travel books of all kinds: travelogues (contemporary & classic), specialist guide books, travel humour, history, biography, anthropology, related fiction, field guides and the odd Lonely Planet guide book. More books are added every week so please bookmark us.

We have been selling books professionally online since 2004 in our main gig, Army of Nerds on Ebay. Over the years we have developed a great reputation for fast and friendly service. But don't take our word for it: click here to see our Army of Nerds eBay feedback page & 11,000+ 100% feedback rating. We are obsessed with travelling and travel books and decided to open up this specialist travel book site to find a home for all the wonderful travel books that are just too niche to sell on Ebay.

Photos of each & every book including cover blurb & sample pages
Pay by Paypal, credit card, bank transfer, money order or cheque
All books posted within 24 hours

Solution Graphics


Those smiley faces...

The smiley faces that greet you at on the Usedtravelbooks.com.au website are from a photo taken in Madagascar, Africa in May 2003. Travelling by road from Tana and then boat in the north east through Lake Ampitambe you reach the isolated Bush House (with resident large geckos in the rooms!). An offer was made of a visit to a local village to organise some musicians and singers for a concert later that evening. The village was on the coast between the lake and the Indian Ocean, with a small school with one teacher and 54 kids. While waiting for the head musician to arrive for the negotiations we treated the local kids to some biscuits from the local store, and the little guy in the blue jumper charged up to the head of the queue pushing everyone else out of the way, but was promptly told to get to the end. He still kept that huge smile on his face. Later I saw him with two biscuits in his hand – he’d worked out the angles! He’s probably head of the village by now. Biscuits probably weren’t the best thing to give these guys – but from their smiles afterwards they sure weren’t complaining! The musicians were excellent and the whole area was amazing – crocodile farms, lemurs, giant snails, nepenthes (carnivourous plants) and many, many varieties of flavoured rum. You get there by road and boat from  the capital Tana or by boat via the Pangalan canal from Taomasina / Tamatave.

Gift certificates now available!

We have stacks of rare and offbeat travel books that you will never find in the stores: a gift certificate from UsedTravelBooks.com.au is a truly unique gift for that special traveller in your life. The books are used so you save a tree and you can get a whole stack of used books for the price of one or two new ones. Gift certificates can be sent by email or by snail mail with gift card at no extra charge.


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