Here are some of my favorite travel books from writers who mean something to me. As the former travel editor of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, Tom Swick published my first travel stories from South America. Rolf Potts led a 2019 travel memoir writers workshop I attended in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In Patagonia was the late Englishman Bruce Chatwin’s first book and showed me what travel writing could be. The descriptions, for the most part, come from Amazon.
Veteran travel writer Thomas Swick reflects on what he has identified as “the seven joys of travel”: anticipation, movement, break from routine, novelty, discovery, emotional connection and heightened appreciation of home. Coupled with the personal essays are seven true stories that illustrate these joys. Each details the author’s experience visiting destinations across the globe, including Munich, Bangkok, Sicily, Iowa and Key West.
This bestselling memoir published in 1940 tells of the often heart-stopping adventures of early 20th-century explorers and photographers Osa and Martin Johnson. The book details Osa’s adventures alongside her husband Martin, an explorer and pioneering photographer. These two kids from Kansas sailed to Borneo, Kenya and the Congo in the early 1900s where, with Martin holding the camera and Osa wielding the gun, they documented the indigenous people and wildlife they encountered.
From the relic-driven quests of early Christians to the mass-produced tchotchkes that line the shelves of a Disney gift shop, travel writer Rolf Potts delves into a complicated history that explores issues of authenticity, cultural obligation, market forces, human suffering, and self-presentation. Souvenirs are shown for what they really are: not just objects, but personalized forms of folk storytelling that enable people to make sense of the world and their place in it.
For more than a decade, Rolf Potts has taken his keen postmodern travel sensibility into the far fringes of five continents for such prestigious publications as National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The New York Times Magazine. This book documents his boldest, funniest, and most revealing journeys—from getting stranded without water in the Libyan desert, to crashing the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, to learning the secrets of Tantric sex in a dubious Indian ashram.
An exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history and unforgettable anecdotes. Chatwin treks through that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America – where bandits were once made welcome – in search of almost-forgotten legends, the descendants of Welsh immigrants and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy.
Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux drives the entire length of the US–Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today’s brutal headlines. This is the latest effort by Theroux (pronounced, “theh – ROO” I am told!), who has written more than 50 (!) books, including another one of my favorites, “The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas” (1989).
An eclectic compendium of the best travel writing essays published in 2018, collected by Alexandra Fuller. BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING gathers together a satisfyingly varied medley of perspectives, all exploring what it means to travel somewhere new. For the past two decades, readers have come to recognize this annual volume as the gold standard for excellence in travel writing.