Since I've been without the funds or time to do much exotic traveling lately, I have indulged my wanderlust with travelogues (which in my extensive research I have found that travel writing is not synonomous with travelogues. I will continue to misuse that word, regardless.). They take me places I want to go when I don't have time or money, places I don't want to go, places I've never heard of, places that might not exist anymore, even some places so foriegn to my worldview that they seem like make believe tales.Sometimes these can be dry, sometimes ridiculous, but almost always captivating in that they are true stories of people, maybe not so different than myself, with not so different a background, people who have had those adventures, who have seen those sites, who have not only lived to tell about it, but took the time to write it down and make it a tale worth telling.
Though I always have a few new (and some old) books that I'm working through (even when backpacking in Europe I brought about four books with me. I only read them on the trains, I swear. And that one time in Zurich when I was tired and sick of looking at cathedrals and so I sat on a bench to wait for my companions.), there are still a few books that I've read more than twice, books that excite my wanderlust even as I try to sate it. If you are an armchair traveler like I sometimes am, I hope that these can help the long dark months between journeys.
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton is my premier travel inspiration. Though more about the pyschological and emotional aspects of traveling than about the pedantic "how I got there and what I saw" logistics, Botton addresses the reasons we travel and what we hope to achieve by going somewhere. By taking different elements of travel and associating those elements with the journeys of those who have gone before, so to speak, he sets the tone for an introspective approach to traveling. I think it essential reading for the veteran traveler as well as the novice before the start of a journey.
Freya Stark is always an inspiration, though it is often difficult to find her writings. I am lucky enough to have access to a university library, but then her work comes in large tomes. Originally, her books where published as smaller editions, easily slipped into one's saddlebag or Aba. Her writing is frank and precise, as she had the roles of diplomat, surveyor, and lady to reconcile. Not only is the timing of her travel and writing impressive, but her attention to detail, both culturally and physically, recreates a rapidly disappearing lifestyle and people.
A Journey Around My Bedroom by Xavier de Maistre is a new favorite. Not only is it original and entertaining, but it reads quickly and succinctly. For something to still read fresh and contemporary when it was written nearly two hundred years ago speaks for itself in our fast paced, here today gone tomorrow world. And it adds a new dimension to travel - that of not traveling. I have yet to read to secondary volume, A Nocturnal Journey Around My Room, but I look forward to further exploring with de Maistre.
Paul Theroux is another author I cannot read enough. In his writing I find a timeless quality and also a grit that is lacking in many modern "travel adventures". He sets out on a journey with a goal or destination in mind and simply records what happens. Theroux doesn't shirk from describing the unfortunate sides of travel as they are, annoyances, potentially harmful, and doesn't pretend that sometimes the people you meet are as bad as the tales they told you at home. But he tempers this reality check of the glamore of travel by being honest, being descriptive, and being slyly humorous.
More and more authors are added daily, by the hour so it seems, but these are a few I return to when I really need to go somewhere far away.
