Travel
Travel writing has a long history. Some 2500 years ago, Herodotus travelled widely in the Middle East and Egypt, researching his History of the Persian War -- and wrote up the unexpected peoples and customs he encountered. Six centuries later, Pausanias walked every kilometre of Greece, recording local legends and customs in a guide-book which, incredibly, can still be used today. Eleven hundreds years later still, the Venetian Marco Polo produced, in Travels (1298), one of the first travel best-sellers, a wide-eyed account of the wonders of medieval Asia -- and travel writing has flourished ever since. For the reader, it has a double attraction: he hear exotic places and people, and the writer takes all the strain. Nowadays, when so much of the world is documented, it is often this last feature, the personal spin each author puts on familiar experience, which gives a book life: personal grouchiness, comedy, fine descriptive prose, interesting reflections,or (in the best books of all), all four.
Mark Abley, Beyond Forget (1988). Forget is a four-street village in the Canadian prairies, and Abley recounts his surreal adventures as he drives there across the 'Big Lonely' -- as hoboes used to call the area.
Bill Bryson, Made in America (1993). Hilarious musings on everything Americanm from popcorn to gridlock, pegged loosely to a narrative of perfectly ordinary tourist travel -- except than nothing, in Bryson's eyes, is ever ordinary.
Richard Burton, A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1855). Burton, disguised as an Arab, was the first European to visit the holy places of Islam, and tells the tale as if he were writing an adventure novel.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Classic account, using letters, diaries amd the author's own Polar experience, of Captain Scott's doomed explorations in the 1910s.
Gerald Durrell, The Bafut Beagles (1953). Funny account of animal-collecting in Africa. Also Three Singles to Adventure, A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (1977). Eighteen-year-old rebel in 1933 sets out to travel from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul -- on foot. Classic of the genre.
Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948). Across the Pacific on a huge balsa-wood raft, to show that Polynesians may have been settlers from ancient South America.
Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897). Unflappable Victorian lady walks and rides through jungles, crosses rivers, clims mountains, camps near hostile villages -- and savours every moment.
Merriwether Lewis, The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1964). Account (by those who did it) of the first East-West crossing by white men of North America.
Geoffrey Moorhouse, Om (1993). Well-known travel-writer tours South India, looking for enlightenment. Fascinating places and people -- and a thoughtful account of the author's spiritual journey.
V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (1964). West Indian writer spends a year in India, writes dazzling, caustic account.
Eric Newby, A Short-Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Author and laconic friend go for walk in the Himalayas, in true Boy's-Own-Paper style. Very funny.
John Preston, Touching the Moon (1990). Obsessed since the age of 13 with Rider Haggard's She, the adult Preston sets out to find her legendary kingdom, in the Mountains of the Moon which border Uganda and Zaire. The reality is sore feet, lice-infested hotels, conmen and eating reconstituted curry in the rain. Hilarious.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). -- by the author of Tristram Shandy.
Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (1979). Splendidly grumbly novelist specialises in horrendous train journeys. This one takes him from Boston, Massachussets, all the way to Patagonia and back. A modern classic.
Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (1969). Across the Sahara with the Bedouin. One of the great contemporary travel books.
Colin Thubron, Behind the Wall (1987). Modern China, its landscape, its people and its uneasy links with a glorious past.
Also recommended: Douglas Botting, One Chilly Siberian Morning Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Alan Moorhead, Cooper's Creek James Morris, The Great Port Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle Gilbert Ronay, The Tartar Khan's Englishman Mary Russell, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt Freya Stark, Riding to the Tigris John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley