“Feynman and Leighton (one of Feynman’s pupils) spend years writing letters, sending faxes and making preparations to get to Tuva, just because Feynman remembered some triangular Tuvan stamps from his youth and loved the spelling of its strange capital, Kyzyl.”
(Notes—see below—on Ralph Leighton’s Tuva or Bust: The Last Journey of Richard Feynman.)

I recently mulled over a couple of lists of what the author/authors consider(s) to be the best travel books ever written. For my list, I will not use melodramatic terms such as “best” or “greatest,” the books below just being my favorites. Many of them have not made the lists of other list-makers; some, such as Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, are rarely left out of any list. Indeed, it is a wonderful book, but perhaps now it has reached the kind of status that never allows James Joyce’s Ulysses and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane ever, ever, ever, to be left out of a “Top 75 Novels” or a “Top 75 Movies” list. I applaud Joyce’s effort, but I know, unlike the books below—a small handful of which are novels, but ones with strong geographical elements—I will be unlikely to read it again, regardless of how many bowls of lather I bear and razors I cross, to paraphrase this book’s famous opening line.

Well, here is my list, for what it’s worth, with some comments on each. Please note that the books are listed in alphabetical order of the name of the author, not as an indication of my favoritism. I hope that you enjoy reading some of them, while, of course, you wait for the next issue of Car & Travel.

1. Iain Banks — Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram
One of Scotland’s foremost current authors was commissioned in 2003 to wander his country’s glens and islands in search of the perfect glass of single-malt whisky. “It’s a tough job,” he commented, “but someone’s got to do it, and I’m damn sure it’s going to be me.” His travels were not easy, the 80 or so distilleries being in lonely spots on lonely islands and in remote valleys. Banks meets a host of memorable characters, travels as far north as the Orkney Islands, stumbles over the whisky villages’ tongue-tying Gaelic names and even has time for a wee dram or two. Rain and high winds are never far away. This is a very enjoyable romp through beautiful Scotland, even if you do not like uisge-beatha, the water of life, the Gaelic words from which whisky gets its name.

2. Matsuo Basho — The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
 This is a travel book full of tender writing. Embarking on any trip in late 17th-century Japan had to have been an adventure, and this work provides a wonderful picture of places that still might be worlds away from the large cities of Tokyo and Osaka. Basho visits friends and temples and illustrates what he sees in words, as well as haiku, carefully constructed Japanese poems.

3. James Boswell — Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson
 It is a great thing that Boswell was an able writer, as his praise of Johnson often seems cloying. I think Johnson would have been a real pain to travel with, every moment making some barbed comment on what he considered the vulgarity of man and the rusticity of the “people.” There are some wonderful descriptions of Scotland, nevertheless, and ultimately the reader will receive more enjoyment from Boswell’s descriptions of places than seemingly Johnson ever did from traveling to them.

4. Paul Bowles — Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue
 American writer Paul Bowles lived most of his life in Tangiers, Morocco, and this book chronicles life there and also in Sri Lanka, India, Turkey and South America. It is full of the rich, descriptive prose that continues to make his novels, such as The Sheltering Sky and The Spider’s House, continued favorites. The strained relationship he had with wife Jane Bowles provides gossip-worthy background.

5. Gerald Brenan — South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village
 Brenan was a member of London’s Bloomsbury Group, an early 20th-century clique of writers known for their liberal, humanistic views. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster were its most famous members. Brenan moved to southern Spain’s Sierra Nevada for 10 years in the 1920s, as he thought his small stipend would go farther there (he lived there again from 1953 until his death in 1987). This book is half social commentary on Spanish customs, half travelogue, and includes one of the earliest descriptions of Guadix, the cave community close to Granada.

6. Luís Vaz de Camões — The Lusiads
 For Portuguese school children, this probably remains required reading. It is an epic poem, written in 1572, a few years after De Camões returned to Portugal, then the world’s most-dominant country, from the Far East. At that time, Portugal was home to great explorers such as Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama, and this work chronicles the latter’s voyage around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to the spice-rich lands of India and Indonesia. Stylistic similarities between it and Homer’s Odyssey are not coincidental.

7. Robert Carver — The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania
 Written in 1996, this book unveils Europe’s “forgotten” country, Albania. Carver does not always seem sympathetic and often is critical (although not as sulkily as Paul Theroux), but his descriptions of this still poor nation are well written. In one scene, he escapes being murdered by two locals armed with knifes by jumping over the wall of a ruin, and I am still bothered by the fact that I do not believe a word of it. The book reaches its height when he travels to the extreme north, around snowy Lake Gashit, to villages that had not seen someone from another European country’s for decades. The warmth and kindness of the Albanians also shines through.

8. Camilo José Cela — Journey to the Alcarria
 I put my hands up and state that this is my favorite travel book and probably my favorite book after Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cela, the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, walks around the Alcarria, a region close to Madrid but perhaps light years away—certainly in Generalissimo Franco’s 1948—in atmosphere. He meets and chats with whoever is on the road and depicts the life of Spanish peasants. I visited one place Cela did in the book, the town of Pastrana, in 2005, and immediately found a fountain that Cela photographed for the book by using that photo as a guide. The writing is in the third person, which lends a gentle, detached view of things.

9. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Letters from a Traveller
Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, philosopher and paleontologist who worked extensively in China and was present at the discovery in the 1920s of an early form of homo sapiens called Peking Man. This work is more of a diary than a straight travel account, but it is no less worthy for the fact. We find Teilhard de Chardin—who increasingly becomes more and more world-renowned as the book continues—traveling around China, as well as to Europe and the United States. This is not hold-onto-your-seats stuff, but his philosophic musings and rural travels make good partners.

10. Bruce Chatwin— In Patagonia
 This work is rightly considered one of the best travel books ever written. Chatwin starts his account of journeying in the middle and south of Argentina, and also Chile, by describing a piece of fur in the cabinet of an aunt of his, which she claimed was from a brontosaurus but he believed actually was from a prehistoric creature called a mylodon. Hence begins this 1977 classic that includes descriptions of the descendants of Welsh farmers, who sang Sunday hymns in their old and by then forgotten language, and the French lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, who sailed to Patagonia and declared himself King of Araucania and Patagonia in 1860, something he repeated in 1869.

11. Thurston Clarke — Searching for Crusoe: A Journey to the Last Real Islands
 Islands always hold a special place in the hearts of travelers, be they our notions of paradise, such as Hawaii and Tahiti, or far-flung, primal spots, such as Más a Tierra, also known as Robinson Crusoe Island. Clarke has traveled to many of these dots-surrounded-by-ocean and both talks to those who still live in these places and examines what it is about islands that appeal to us. (Note that this book also can be found under the titles Islomania and Searching for Paradise: A Grand Tour of the World’s Unspoiled Islands.) Among the memorable chapters are those on Jura and Eigg in the Scottish Hebrides and the sacred Greek island of Patmos. Playgrounds such as Roatán in Honduras and Grand Cayman also are included.

12. Joseph Conrad — Heart of Darkness
 Heart of Darkness is a classic tale that recounts a trip along the Congo River in search of a trading-station manager called Kurtz, who has apparently stopped selling ivory and turned “primitive.” The narrator is Marlow, who tells the tale while sitting on a boat in London, a nice twist, London being then the “heart of colonialism.” The descriptions of Africa—beating drums, thick forests and shadowy, unnamed people—have been attacked as stereotypical, but Conrad’s writing remains powerful, no small feat for a Pole who had to learn English. It is no exaggeration to say that Conrad takes you forcibly on the same journey as Marlow purely by the strength of his prose. (The novel also mentions the little-known Thames River town of Erith, where I grew up, so that’s reason enough for me to like it.)

13. William Dalrymple — In Xanadu
This was Dalrymple’s first attempt at writing, and it is wondrous for the innocence (naïvité?) in which he conducts the whole trip, from Jerusalem to Beijing. This trip had been done before, by Marco Polo (see below), but Polo, although no doubt subject to some problems, did not face the 20th–century geopolitical tempest that is modern-day Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, not to mention China, which in 1990 was very much still a closed society, certainly in its western reaches. Dalrymple finally finds his way to Xanadu, supposedly the site of the famed place of Kubla Khan. This is travel writing at its best, with equal amounts of setbacks and moments of joy. There also is the added interest of his undertaking the first part of the journey with a fearless woman who he had only meet two weeks before and the second half with his ex-girlfriend of only a matter of months.

14. James West Davidson and John Rugge — Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure
I was memorized by this tale of travel to a last frontier. The book starts slowly but really races after one of the two original travelers freezes to death trying to return from an aborted mission from one side of Canada’s Labrador to the other. This Hudson Valley man’s wife soon falls out with the survivor, when the survivor publishes an account of the story. Suitably irked, she decides to finish her husband’s expedition (immediately upon doing this, the survivor announced he was to also put together a competing party). This was all set in the Victorian age of discovery, and the public then was as enthralled in the tale as you will be today. The land is majestically described, as are the Cree Indian guides and trappers. Get ready for adventure.

15. Frances E. FitzGerald — Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures
 This is social analysis of modern-day “utopian” communities, rather than a book of miserable meals, overcrowded buses and stolen travelers’ checks. The book, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, looks at four distinct U.S. communities: An Oregon commune set up by a Rolls Royce-driving guru; a Florida retirement town; a Baptist religious community in Virginia; and San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro District. I must have read it not long after it was published in 1986, but still it resonates with me, only if because I do not remember reading much since that was as well presented. The author regards all four communities as being counter to “conservative” American culture, although they are radically different and probably everyone chronicled would be horrified to realize that they are thought to share similarities.

16. Ian Fleming — Thrilling Cities
 How could you not like a travel book written by Mr. James Bond, 007, himself? Commissioned by London’s Times newspaper, Fleming, who was at the height of his James Bond fame, set around the world seeking out vice at every turn. In—and in order—Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo (not all of these seem particularly seedy any more, do they?), our fearless writer seeks out the best drinking, gambling and partying spots in the world. Really, what a junket! After all, this is just research for his famous hero, no?

17. Peter Fleming — Brazilian Adventure
 Peter Fleming, Ian’s brother, was a respected writer in his own right. This tale is a classic and can be put on your shelf next to James West Davidson and John Rugge’s Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure, mentioned above, and Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, mentioned below. This is a heady mixture of descriptive writing on the Amazon region’s Aragauaia and Tapirapé rivers, a race home between two argumentative factions and the mystery of the search for Colonel Fawcett, the original goal of the combined expedition. It could also be thrown away as the squabbles of a bunch of privileged young men (Fleming went to Eton College high school and Christ’s College, Cambridge) escaping the straightjacket of English life in the early to mid-20th century.

18. Gabriel García Márquez — The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
 This tale originally was serialized in a Colombian newspaper in 1955, when the whole country held its collective breath until the end of its final installment. García Márquez’s first major work (although it was not published in book form until 1970), it recounts the tribulations of Luis Alejandro Velasco, the sole survivor of the sinking of a naval vessel bound to Colombia from Mobile, Ala. Lots of suitably heroic prose shows how Velasco drank sea water and caught fish with his bare hands; added to this is the scandal that the disaster was likely caused by overweighing the ship with contraband—and on a government vessel, no less. (García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.)

19. Bill Geist — Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-town America
Car & Travel reviewed this book in its Sept. 2007 issue, as well as interviewing the popular CBS reporter himself. This is a chummy romp through the eccentricities of small-town America, most notably in the Midwest and West. Strange festivals are a favorite, including one in which celebrated is the fact that the sun shines straight down the railway tracks only at a certain time on one day a year and another in which the town is so small, the audience walks around, rather than the parade. The book also is a cry of help to help save this way of life, although the author absolutely has no idea how to go about doing that. By the book’s finish, you might feel oddly proud to live in the same country as all these goings-on.

20. John Gimlette — At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay
 Travel writers love to write about odd places, and no country seems to fit the bill better than the South American nation of Paraguay: mad dictators, one with an Irish wife he met in a house of ill repute in Paris, while he was there spending what little money his new nation had; Nazis on the run, and stoic and isolated Mennonites scratching a living in the world’s most desolate swamp are a few of the people who somehow saw in Paraguay their ideal. Published three years ago, the book is amusing, with Gimlette realizing humor is the only possible vehicle in which to analyze the place. The title refers to the surprisingly number of inflatable pink pigs he saw, a phenomena that he never quite understands. This book will not disappoint.

21. Graham Greene — Travels with My Aunt
 The celebrated British writer led a full life, and while this 1970 book is intended as fiction (the narrator is one Henry Pulling), it is generally accepted that this is more early autobiography than it is whimsy. Place this next to Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities. Pulling meets his great aunt for only the second time before he becomes, initially unwillingly, part of her travel plans. The aunt is unconventional, and soon he finds himself—still begrudgingly—party to currency smuggling in Turkey and a dash to Paraguay (again, Paraguay!) to get the aunt’s former lover off criminal charges. This book, as the English might describe it, is a hoot.

22. Heinrich Harrer — Seven Years in Tibet
 More adventurous stuff. Harrer first went to Tibet on the run from a British POW camp during World War II. His fleeing was not a matter of hiding in a barn, but an underdressed, relatively unprepared climb over the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range, and during a time when Tibet was forbidden to foreigners. The book describes how this plucky Austrian reached Lhasa, Tibet’s spiritual capital, after five years of struggle and stayed there for another seven years. In that time, he befriended the current Dalai Lama, which adds a grand sweep of history to this epic. Forget the Brad Pitt film.

23. Thor Heyerdahl — Kon-Tiki
 Yet more adventure. Chronicling a journey made in 1947, from Callao, Peru, to the Tuamotu atolls east of Tahiti, this work brought the Polynesian Islands firmly to the attention of the world. (Norwegian Heyerdahl would later do the same for Easter Island, and its majestic Moai statues.) Most of Heyerdahl’s theories on who were the earliest Polynesians and how they reached these islands now have been roundly disproved, or at least widely faulted, but that should not allow you to miss enjoying this 4,000-mile endeavor, six Scandinavians pitting their wits against the world’s largest ocean while floating on nine balsa logs.

24. Homer — The Odyssey
 It took longer to travel in the 12th century B.C.E. Odysseus, the hero of this book, took 10 years to get from Troy (its former site now is Hisarlik, Turkey) to Ithaca (Greece). On his way back, his journey involves battling Cyclops and the Sirens, among others, and being thwarted for amusement’s sake only by the gods Zeus and Poseidon. Then he has to defeat the hordes of unworthy suitors who are attempting to marry his wife Penelope, who believed Odysseus was dead. Homer also claims that Odysseus started his travels in the Wooden Horse of Troy. (Odysseus in Latin and English is written as Ulysses, so there is a link to James Joyce’s novel.)

25. Christopher Hunt — Sparring with Charlie: Motorbiking Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail
 American Christopher Hunt—his father is Richard P. Hunt, a TV correspondent who covered the Vietnam War—was in Vietnam supposedly to research a novel. In order to do that, he bought an old Russian motorcycle for $400 and set off on a 2,000-mile jaunt around the country, where he found that at every turn the Vietnamese were kind to and interested in Americans (and I have not heard anything since to dissuade me of this). Hunt encounters numerous problems, not the least of which are buffalo bathing in puddles in the middle of the road. He also displays a degree of naïvité, not a bad trait if the writer is able. This was written in 1996, way before the current upswing in interest in traveling to Vietnam. Place this next to William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu.

26. Pico Iyer — Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World
 British born to Indian parents, educated in England and at Harvard, now based in Japan, Iyer is a very celebrated travel-book and -article writer. His unorthodox background has him well placed to write on the downright strange, and I picked this 1994 work, among his other worthy choices, as I like reading about odd places. And yes, Paraguay is featured. Argentina, Australia, Bhutan, Cuba, Iceland and Vietnam also are covered, the word “lonely” applied to both politically and geographically isolated places. Bonus country: the Hermit Kingdom itself, North Korea, complete with its mass games and one of the world’s tallest hotels (no one has ever stayed there), which taxi drivers are forbidden to refer to when discussing directions.

27. Ryszard Kapuscinski — Travels with Herodotus
 Kapuscinski, who died early last year, was a Polish writer equally known for his travel writing and novels based on political figures or dynasties. This book jumps from place to place in Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa and both follows the cultures and events mentioned in the Ancient Greek writer Herodotus’ Histories (hence the title) and Kapuscinski’s own travels as a foreign correspondent for a Polish newspaper. Equally wonderful is his The Soccer War, which chronicles journeys taken in an official capacity when covering 27 coups and revolutions, mainly in Africa and Latin America, including the one that gave him the title for the book. In 1969, supposedly, the kickoff of an El Salvador-Honduras game was the sign for the El Salvadorean army to invade Honduras.

28. Jack Kerouac — On the Road
 Typewritten on a 120-foot-long role of paper, this autobiographical journey (the book’s Sal Paradise is Kerouac) through the United States is required reading for anyone who yearns for the Interstate Highway System. Yes, there is some less than condonable behavior, but the work’s goal, to outline the freedom of the U.S. road and the new “freedoms” of the counter-culture of 1950s America, still shines through brightly. (In 2002 I took the ferry from New Orleans across the Mississippi to the small, quiet town of Algiers, solely because in this book Kerouac mentions it.) The two famous characters in the book, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, have this conversation: “Where we going, man?” “I don’t know, but we gotta go.” Excellent advice.

29. Matthew Kneale — English Passengers
 Perhaps the funniest book in the list, English Passengers features a comic cast of misguided characters on a search for the true site of the Garden of Eden (in Tasmania, apparently) who sail almost the entire circumference of the planet. Set in 1857, the work covers the Isle of Man in the British Isles; the extinction of Tasmanian aborigines; pirates; storms; escaped convicts and massive swaths of the world’s oceans.

30. Tété-Michel Kpomassie — An African in Greenland
It is permissible, I think, to place this book next to Homer’s Odysseus, due to the struggles experienced by the author. Kpomassie chanced upon a copy of National Geographic magazine in his native Togo (in every other mention of this, the writer has Kpomassie chancing upon a “book,” but I am convinced I read many years ago that the photos he saw were actually in that worthy magazine), but the one article that grabbed his attention was on Greenland, which I am guessing looks different to Sub-Saharan West Africa. He was determined to visit, a trip that started in 1958 and took 10 years of bad jobs and inadequate housing to reach. Finally realizing his goal, he spent two years in Greenland, living and working with the Inuit.

31. Jon Krakauer — Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
 Mount Everest always has drawn the fascinated, readers as well as adventurers. Krakauer raised his profile to a lofty peak with this account of a failed expedition to the world’s highest spot. The book in turn angers and exhilarates. It definitely ignited the argument of who belongs there: Trained, gifted climbers and/or wealthy adventure-seekers who often, and increasingly, bankroll the former category. In total, nine climbers died in the trek, but one who did not was a Texan doctor who had been left to die (there is little room up there for social niceties) but who woke up after being exposed for 12 hours and somehow stumbled into camp.

32. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa — Two Stories and a Memory
 Tomasi di Lampedusa, born into an aristocratic family in Sicily, Italy, is best known for his novel, The Leopard, but I found the English translation I read to be a bit plodding and anticlimactic. Better, in my opinion, is this collection (not intended by the author) of accounts of his 1910’s childhood journeying around Sicily. Perhaps not surprisingly, he spends most of the book quietly mourning the demise of the old, aristocratic Italy that disappeared with the unification of the country, a process that began before he was born. That said, he gripes in beautiful language.

33. Alfred Lansing — Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
 Ernest Shackleton was an experienced Antarctic sailor and—you can do nothing but agree after finishing this book—a consummate leader of men. This 1959 account of this 1914-1916 expedition is riveting stuff. The sheer weight of pack ice smashed his specially strengthened boat and led to Shackleton and his crew abandoning boat and embarking on an Epic (capital “E” please) journey across and through the most inhospitable ice and sea on the planet. Some of what they managed to do—in a small row boat and minus today’s high-tech equipment and clothes)—is simply mind-blowing, so much so that hardened Norwegian sailors applauded him whenever he walked by for years after his eventual return. He also did not leave a single man behind.

34. William Least Heat Moon — Blue Highways: A Journey into America
 Recently made jobless, a long-term relationship over, Least Heat Moon decided in 1982 to take a journey around the United States. He drove and slept in an old van and only traveled along back roads, which on the earliest highway maps of this country were marked in blue. This is a quite wonderful book and should be placed next to Bill Geist’s Way Off the Road. Driving from Kansas to Texas to California to Washington to Vermont and Maryland, among other states, and back to Kansas, the most memorable of his visits are to Nameless, Tenn., and Smith Island, Md., which peaked my curiosity sufficiently that I traveled there last summer for an upcoming article in Car & Travel. (Least Heat Moon wrote an article in May 2002 edition of Car & Travel, entitled “Connecting Roads.”)

35. Laurie Lee — As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
 Still a teenager, Lee left his home in England to walk through Spain in the days before the start of the Spanish Civil War. In the mid-1930s, Spain was a shadowy mystery, a land of bullfighters, Don Quixote, siestas and flamenco. It was little known to outsiders, and his only possession was a violin, which he played for tips. Place this next to V.S. Pritchett’s Spanish Temper, although this one is written with a lot more innocence and picturesque detail.

36. Ralph Leighton — Tuva or Bust: The Last Journey of Richard Feynman
 The title is a little misleading, as Richard Feynman—a Nobel Prize winner in physics, a collaborator in the development of the atomic bomb and a member of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster committee—never did reach the remote Russian state of Tuva, known today for its throat singers. That said, isn’t a lot of the fun of traveling to do with pouring over maps and fine-tuning the details? Feynman and Leighton (one of Feynman’s pupils) spend years writing letters, sending faxes and making preparations to get to Tuva, just because Feynman remembered some triangular Tuvan stamps from his youth and loved the strange spelling of its capital, Kyzyl. Feynman died a matter of days before final approval was given, so Leighton continued with the physicist’s final wish. Next time your plane is delayed, think of the trials and tribulations experienced here.

37. David Lewine — Death and the Sun: A Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain
 Bullfighting remains very important to the Spaniards, even though many there dismiss it as bloodthirsty and archaic. Lewine sees the practice (or custom? or art?) as a great vehicle for a travel book, and he is right, although in his recounting a year in the life of fourth-generation matador Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, he is careful not to lecture or take sides in the argument. Traveling around Spain, the reader sees the colors of the land, the anxieties of being part of Ordóñez’s team and the way of life of numerous midsize Spanish cities. Only for a few matadors is life glamorous; it’s the equivalent to that endured by a minor-league baseball player, albeit with perhaps a little more danger.

38. Norman Lewis — Voices of the Old Sea
 Lewis’ quiet style won him legions of fans all the way up to his passing at the age of 95 in 2003. He started writing during World War II. Voices of the Old Sea is set in a Spanish Mediterranean fishing village that seems always, in the writer’s view, to be days away from the ills of tourism development. (Today, it is a tourist development.) The notes for this book published in the 1980s were undertaken over three summers in the late 1940s, years in which the village of Farol was concerned only with sardine catches, local arguments and the weather.

39. Tim Mackintosh-Smith — Yemen: The Unknown Arabia
 Place this book next to Robert Carver’s work on Albania, The Accursed Mountains. Yemen is an ancient nation, the original Arabia Felix, but today is unfortunately known for kidnappings and bombings. Intrigued as I am by islands, the chapter on Socotra especially fascinated me, but Mackintosh-Smith’s other Yemeni trips do a good job of keeping one’s attention, too. When you have finished, compare his notes with those in Freya Stark’s A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen written in 1938. Mackintosh-Smith studied Arabic in a remote crofter’s cottage in Scotland before reaching Yemen, where he has lived ever since and written a further six books on the area.

40. André Malraux — The Royal Way
 This book, like Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene (Malraux led an equally exciting life) and On the Road by Jack Kerouac’s, which it could be placed between, is an autobiographical account of Malroux’s 1920’s travels in Cambodia, where in real life he was arrested by the French colonial police for smuggling out rare artifacts from the famed temple of Angkor Wat. And to think later he was made France’s first Minister of Culture! One of the plots in the book is the search for a lost French explorer, so this also could be placed next to Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure.

41. Pete McCarthy — McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland
 McCarthy is an Englishman with Irish ancestry, on a search for his roots and never passing by any pub that bears his name. He definitely has a wealth of British sarcasm to fall upon and enough sense to doubt himself and his motives at every twist and turn of the notoriously winding Irish road network. He meets English dropouts, joins a pilgrimage and bemoans the wholesale selling of the concept of Irishness, something he later examines on the worldwide stage in his only other book, The Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland. Sadly, McCarthy died from cancer at the age of 52 in 2004.

42. James Morris — The World of Venice
 Travel writers possibly might be a jealous, cantankerous bunch, but one thing they all seem to have in common is their respect for Welsh writer Morris, whose first travel book, published in 1956, was entitled As I Saw the U.S.A. Any of Morris’ books could be chosen, but The World of Venice is remarkable for its ability to make 1,500 years of history read like a travel journal or a memoir. Tales of Murano glass blowers being hunted down and murdered if they left La Serenissima with their secrets, the goings-on within canalside mansions and the torrid histories of the city leaders, the Doges, all read as though someone today, walking or being poled on a gondola, would be very likely to experience the very same happenings.

43. Jan Morris — Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
 No writer in this list has had two of his or her books reviewed. Actually, that’s not true. Morris is the first. The Welsh writer dropped out of sight for a few years in the early 1970s. When he emerged, he was a she, but perhaps because the person in question was a relatively reclusive writer, not a fueled-by-publicity sports or movie star, there was refreshingly very little publicity. The writing remained excellent. This book is quite remarkable, a study on a small Italian city wedged between the country of Slovenia and the Adriatic Sea, which during the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was the most important city in Europe. (The question of to which country the city belonged to after World War I produced some of the most heated arguments following that conflict.) Now it is largely forgotten (although it remains the home of Illy coffee), and Morris’s words superbly capture a place that seems now to run on the fumes of its previous grandeur.

44. H.V. Morton — In Search of England
 Morton found a profitable niche in the mid-20th century with his In Search of… series of books, which included volumes on London, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Spain and the Holy Land. In all, he wrote 50 travel volumes. For this work, he puttered around England in his Morris car that he nicknamed Maud, seeing an England that in 1926 was changing rapidly, coming between the end of World War I and the Great Depression. His later book What I Saw in the Slums is a good companion book to the more pointed social commentary of George Orwell (see below). It is always a temptation to regard old books as this as conclusive proof that the past was gentler and more respectable, but Morton’s prose certainly could be offered as evidence that that was the case.

45. (Anonymous; some tales credited to Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen) — The Adventures of Baron Münchausen
This wonderful piece of fiction should be placed next to Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. (Indeed, the calculated but occasionally hapless Passepartout from that novel would make a great companion and modifying influence for and on Münchausen.) Travel writers perhaps occasionally are prone to exaggeration, and no travel tale is more of a fib than the engaging story that gave the world the condition known as Münchausen’s Syndrome, the consistent trait of bringing attention to oneself with feigned illness or fictitious boasts. Münchhausen (the second “h” usually is dropped from the book’s title) did exist, a lieutenant fighting in Turkey and Russia, who arrived back in Germany already famous for his tall tales. Soon, parodies of his boasting were published, including supposed journeys to North America, the Nile, the Mediterranean, Mount Etna, Africa and the moon, just about anywhere where his fanciful yarns could not be conclusively proved false. Upon finishing this, however, you probably will not care that it is all a whopping falsehood.

46. Abdelrahman Munif — Story of a City
Munif is known mostly for his remarkable Cities of Salt trilogy, three novels set in an unnamed Gulf nation and critical of oil development and interests. (His previous career was as an oil diplomat for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and an active member of the disgraced Ba’ath political party.) For his pains, he lost his Saudi citizenship and moved to Syria. He is in fact from Jordan, although like Jan Morris’ Trieste, his birthplace of Amman has changed the country it is part of more than once. The book is a joyous reminiscence of his childhood home. His mother was Iraqi, and Baghdad is mentioned often, the notion often percolating through that individual nations within a larger Arab world are rather meaningless and ridiculous.

47. V.S. Naipual — An Area of Darkness
Born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, Naipaul traveled throughout India, the land of his ancestors, in the early 1960s. This was only two years after he was invited by his own government to record his impressions on his newly independent home, in a book entitled The Middle Passage. (Those who know this 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature winner might justly consider that kind offer to be a potentially devastating risk.) Naipual never holds back, and in this book he savagely criticizes the exercise of colonialism, as well roundly lampooning the mores and pretensions of the people of India, who both celebrated independence but still seemingly mourned for the days of the British raj. Anyone following literary feuds will know that this book should definitely not be placed anywhere near Paul Theroux’s.

48. R.K. Narayan — My Dateless Diary: An American Journey
Narayan is loved for his South Indian stories, written in English, that chronicle his fictional town of Malgudi, as rich a created settlement as Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo or William Faulkner’s re-created county of Yoknapatawpha. This is an amusing set of diary notes on Narayan’s travels to New York (where he met and was asked for by the reclusive Greta Garbo), Chicago, Tennessee, the Grand Canyon and California. The book works so well for its analysis of the clash of cultures he experienced: Indians were not so known in the United States in 1964, and much of what the U.S. gloried in at the time—self-cleaning ovens, TV commercials, self-serve cafeterias—were as much a mystery to him as was the dark side of the moon. This exercise of seeing your country through the eyes of a foreigner was to me a worthy endeavor.

49. Eric Newby — Departures and Arrivals
 Another highly respected British travel writer is Eric Newby, who is most known for his 1958 work, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. That was not a short walk at all, instead a climb and trek through the Himalayas, but the idea of the title came from the generalized notion of the gentleman English traveler, especially in the age of empire, that stated that he or she would garner more respect if any undertaking was both difficult and conducted completely in the spirit of amateurism. Newby maintained that status by occasionally interrupting his career as a fashion designer in order to travel. This book, his last, is a fantastic collection of notes on his own childhood home—Barnes, in southwest London—and more-distant places such as Rajasthan in India, Tuscany in Italy and the opal fields of Australia, as well as a bicycle journey in England, where his course never veers from two degrees west of the Greenwich median line, and in November, because, as the author says, it is the only month in England in which one does not need advance reservations at B&Bs.

50. George Orwell — Road to Wigan Pier
 This is perhaps the book in this list containing the weightiest subject matter. This is not tourist-brochure prose. Orwell, author of such classic novels as Animal Farm and 1984, travels through and poignantly criticizes life in some of the most wretched towns in 1930’s industrialized England. One of the towns written about is Sheffield, which also was the subject of the 1997 film The Full Monty. It was horrible in Orwell’s day, and, unfortunately, some of it remains so today. Orwell journeys through the northern counties of Derbyshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire, staying with mining families, spending time down their pits and noting their lifestyles and customs.

51. Mungo Park — Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
For many travelers, the Malian city of Timbuktu is a by-word for any remote place that they one day aspire to travel to. The world’s Timbuktus are hard to reach, mysterious and seemingly always out of reach. Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa have fascinated the public for centuries, and the first travelers who tried to reach them often ended up butchered. Like China, Japan and Lhasa (Tibet) also were, this part of Africa was off-limits to foreigners. Many had tried, including Park in this book, who came close on his first of two expeditions in 1794 (he was killed on the second). He did complete some valuable charting of the Niger River, and this book (put together posthumously) covers his adventures in what was then known as the Dark Continent, a name that was sure to elicit much interest back home in Empire-building Britain. (The first person to reach Timbuktu, by the way, and get home again, was Frenchman René Caillié in 1828.)

52. Marco Polo — The Travels of Marco Polo
This is one of the most-famous travel books of all time, currently in its ninth century of publication (earliest volumes were handwritten), although, except for a few sections of travel writing—the lands of the Assassins in Persia, for instance—it reads more like a business manual than it does a travel guide. Polo regularly records the buying and selling costs of silk and foodstuffs. For example, he writes, “There is manufactured a large quantity of sugar, which pays three and one-third percent. But goods coming from sea pay 10 per cent. So likewise all native articles of the country, as cattle, the vegetable produce of the soil and silk, pay a tax to the king.” Not exactly the prose of Norman Lewis or Paul Theroux. That said, there are some excellent descriptions of the Silk Road, Madagascar, Zanzibar and the fabulous palace of the Kubla Khan in China. It took Polo 22 years to get back to his native Venice, so it is worth spending a few weeks reading one of the first travel books ever produced. Follow this up with William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu.

53. Gontran de Poncins — Kabloona
 Another worthwhile book that features an otherworldly landscape, this time a journey from Edmonton in Canada to the far north of the country, notably King William Land. Written in the late 1930s, this is a marvelous account of life with the Inuit. The writer follows their seasonal lives hunting for seal, visiting friends and watching the thickness of the ice increase and decrease. As with The Travels of Marco Polo described above, it is worth a few hours of our time to read this, if only to experience Frenchman De Poncins running 1,400 miles behind a dogsled. The word kabloona is the Inuit word for Westerners.

54. Laurens van der Post — The Lost World of the Kalahari
 In the mid-1950s, Sir Laurens van der Post, who later on became a close friend and teacher to Prince Charles, was commissioned to film a six-part documentary on the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, whose ancestral lands overlap into Botswana and South Africa. This book was a result of that British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) project. Finding the Bushmen proved difficult, and this work is just as exciting for its near misses as it is for its successes. All through the book Van der Post recounts tales of his childhood, in which he had a Kalahari nurse and learned Kalahari customs and nobility. He also pours scorn on how this noble people have been brought down so low.

55. V.S. Pritchett — The Spanish Temper
 Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett writes in his most-famous work Midnight Oil how through long struggle he became a writer, living in garrets (the traditional way for a novice writer, so I'm told) in London, Paris and Madrid in the 1920s. He lived in the Spanish capital for two years in the middle part of that decade and returned several times during that decade, the next and the 1950s, by which time he had become a respected writer, author and literary critic. This book is an account of where he wandered through Spain (you might have noticed that Spain is a passion with me, too) and a description of a changing country that had lived—and just in a recent span of years—through a monarchy, a republic and finally a dictatorship. What he sees is a proud country of colorful custom and history that had slowly sunk back into medievalism. He also records the history and geography of the country through the eyes and words of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who died crushed by the effects of the Spanish Civil War on his country, and sad, lonely Philip II (also see Sacheverell Sitwell’s entry below), among others. I have always liked the line that one person Pritchett met said to him: “It is better to begin a friendship with a little aversion.”

56. E. Annie Proulx — The Shipping News
 This inclusion is one purely of fiction, but it would not surprise me if the author’s depictions of the rough coastlines and hard lives of Newfoundland fishing communities are right on the money. The novel also is a lesson in journalism, too, the central character working for a local newspaper in which every issue has to contain the gory details of at least one car wreck. Life is hard and cold here, where one big storm can blow away a whole life, or so it would seem from Proulx’s prose. (Try saying these last two words together 10 times during a nor’easter.)

57. Arthur Ransome — Swallows and Amazons
 The Arthur Ransome stories are what set me off on my reading adventure more than 30 years ago. Either set in England’s beautiful Lake District or Norfolk Broads districts, Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and Coot Club books have its young heroes immersed in all kinds of fun in an age when children were expected to get skinned knees as part of their education. A U.S. equivalent might be the Nancy Drew stories. In Swallows and Amazons, Ransome describes never-ending summers in the Lake District, where “pirates” defend child-only camps, mysterious strangers are seen walking across hillsides, kindly uncles pamper to childish but colorful imaginations and the countryside is described in full splendor. It still is perfectly plausible to read these books as an adult.

58. Salman Rushdie — The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
 The Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution was particularly popular among left-wing intellectuals. This book probably is the best travel work on that period, although it might be—and probably has been—partially written off for its pandering to a cause that was the darling cause célèbre of the intelligentsia. It remains an interesting account, nevertheless, with Rushdie traveling to Sandinista camps, to farms deep in the jungle but never far from gunfire and to the rarely visited Caribbean coast, reachable only by boat or light plane. This was written in 1986, during the Sandinistas seventh year of power and three years before Rushdie got in a pickle following publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

59. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — The Little Prince
 This beloved picture book works on two levels. The first is as a children’s book, a simple tale, the second is as one for adults, in which if the text is analyzed is most profound. (Perhaps the same is true of the TV series, The Simpsons.) De Saint-Exupéry, who died during World War II, his plane disappearing over the Mediterranean (it was discovered only in 2004), continues to delight readers with this story, in which the Little Prince travels to seven asteroids, all inhabited by foolish people. An interesting fact is that De Saint-Exupéry wrote the book in Asharoken, in Long Island’s Suffolk County.

60. José Saramago — Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture
 If Saramago, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, was not such a gifted writer, his use of referring to himself in the third person—and as The Traveler, no less—might quickly became a tad annoying, but he weaves such a pleasant tapestry of his native Portugal and conjures such an array of rich images of the landscape that he is soon forgiven. I did not want this to end and especially enjoyed his frequently thwarted attempts to procure the key for the church of the particularly village he happened to be in. The notion that architects and artists are important to the feel and pause of landscape is something he shares with the next book in this list.

61. Sacheverell Sitwell — Southern Baroque Art: A Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the 17th and 18th Centuries
The title of this 1924 book does not give too much hope that its subject matter will be travel, but after an initial handful of dense pages, the full wonder that is Southern Baroque Art shines through. Architecture, music and art are mentioned, but by the end of the book, the reader also has enjoyed layer upon layer of notes on scenery, travel and landscape. Sitwell has such control over this subject matter that the text continually circles delightfully back to his main arguments. The lengthy chapter on how the famous Italian castrato Farinelli sang every evening, unseen, to the melancholic Philip II of Spain, and its descriptions of Spanish towns and landscape, is remarkable and launched Sitwell on his respected career. Some southern Italian towns, such as Lecce and Noto (Sicily), practically were put on the map—at least to English-speaking audiences—by this work.

62. Captain Joshua Slocum — Sailing Alone Around the World
Captain Slocum, a Nova Scotian with roots in New England, was the first person to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world, a feat that he started in April 1895 and finished in June 1898. These are his adventures. They are all written in a very matter-of-fact style, so much so that they seem from his words—if not from his deeds—as little more frightening than a venture to the end of a back garden. Near run-ins with spear-wielding Tierra de Fuegans (the pure race of which now is extinct), a visit to Robinson Crusoe’s island and cave, unwanted attention from sharks and a visit to the island in which Napoleon spent his exile are some of the deeds recounted, all completed in a 37-foot, homemade boat called the Spray. Heroic stuff. Those inspired to do the same might one day be enrolled in the Connecticut-based Joshua Slocum Society International.

63. Freya Stark — The Valleys of the Assassins
 Knighted for her travels and literature, Freya Stark started her wanderings in the 1920s, an age in which women were not supposed to do that kind of thing. She was fearless and lived to over 100 years of age. Her first book was about a journey to the forbidden lands of the Syrian Druze, where she landed in jail. Her next was no less sedate, a six-month jaunt to the home of the once feared cult of the Assassin in the region of Luristan, which straddles parts of present-day Iran and Iraq. For that reason, place this book next to Marco Polo’s (see above) and Wilfred Thesiger’s (see below). Fluent in Arabic and several other regional languages, she detailed the sandy and rocky lands of Arabia with loving detail and also extended Western knowledge of local customs and regional archaeology and maps. This land was virtually unknown to Westerners, which makes her adventures all the more daring.

64. John Steinbeck — Travels With Charley: In Search of America
 This makes the perfect companion book to William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. Written in 1962, two decades before Least Heat Moon’s book, this work follows Steinbeck’s trip around his native United States in a converted van named Rocinante, named after Don Quixote’s horse, and accompanied only by Charley, his French poodle. There is a local connection, as Steinbeck set off on this journey from his eastern Long Island home in Sag Harbor. There is little of the United States he does not visit, having told friends that he wanted to find out “what Americans are like today.” Perhaps it was a quest to see if Americans remained the same as those he chronicled in one of his most famous novels, 1939’s Grapes of Wrath. His notes on his childhood Californian roosts also are memorable.

65. Robert Sullivan — The Meadowlands
 The sweep of India or the United States or the jetting around between one continent and another not always is needed for great travel writing. A case in point is this wonderful gem that picks New Jersey’s Meadowlands—yes, the one along Chemical Alley, otherwise known as the New Jersey Turnpike—as its subject. (It now is much cleaner. I used to work half a mile from Mill Creek Marsh Trail, which opened in 2002 and attracts more bird species with every year.) Sullivan meets all types of characters and describes a landscape few of us have looked at beyond a quick glance in the rearview mirror. His only mode of transport was a kayak and often he did not see a single person all day. And this less than five miles from Manhattan. This is a book that shows us travel does not always have to be on a grand scale and to epic destinations.

66. Jonathan Swift — Gulliver’s Travels
In the world of novels, this is a colossus. It also is an attack on colonialism (quite aptly, perhaps, from an Irishman living in 1726 under English rule) and racism. Does it matter that Balnibarbi, Brobdingnag, Glubbdubdrib, Laputa, Lilliput, Luggnagg and the Country of the Houyhnhnms perhaps do not exist? Are we so arrogant as to suggest that we know conclusively every speck of earth on Earth? The only place Gulliver traveled to that we do for sure know exists is Japan, but Japan in the early 18th century was a mysterious, closed land and just as legendary as his other ports of call. This book is a marvelous thing.

67. Paul Theroux — The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
 This is the real deal, a travel book that starts on Boston’s T subway system and ends on a small steam train in the far south of Argentina’s Patagonia region. (In fact, this book made that short line a cult destination, rather like Timbuktu, Tuva and Tasmania (all mentioned above)). As much as he can, Theroux’s only means of transportation is the train, which lands him in a migrant community on the Rio Grande, at a soccer match-turned-full-scale war in El Salvador (also see the notes on Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus) and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he meets celebrated writer Jorge Luis Borges. Theroux’s books are rich affairs, but he often comes across as a sour curmudgeon who believes that he and only he possesses the real reason and right to travel.

68. Wilfred Thesiger — Arabian Sands
 Another English writer who lived until a ripe age, Thesiger is known for his journeys around Arabia, in particular to Yemen. In an interesting note, both he and Evelyn Waugh (see below) were invited to the 1933 coronation of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, although neither mentions the other. His foremost gift to literature is the classic Arabian Sands, which was published in 1959 and recounts his travels in Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia between 1945 and 1950. Freya Stark got to this part of the world before him, but Thesiger’s text provides the first detailed account of Arabia’s Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter, before the discovery of oil and the vanishing life of its Bedouin people. So enthralled was Thesiger by his subject matter, he rarely in his 93 years returned to his native land. After finishing this, perhaps pick up one of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt novels (see above).

69. Colin Thubron — Among the Russians
 This 10,000-mile solo car trip through Russia was undertaken in 1980, when not even the author could foretell the huge geopolitical changes about to take place there. Thubron clearly wants to like Russia, raised as he was on the novels of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Ivan Turgenev, but this seems more and more unlikely as the books goes on. Desperate people wanting to get to the West, endless evenings of swilling vodka in the name of friendship, being followed relentlessly by official tourist guides and visiting a Georgian museum dedicated to its most infamous son, Joseph Stalin, are some of his stories. What the reader is left with is an account of how low people can sink and the humanity that even—perhaps more so—such people can muster.

70. Mark Twain — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 This is one of the most famous novels ever written, a book that has launched a thousand expeditions down the Mississippi. Published in 1884, it is a page-turning tale of Tom Sawyer’s best friend getting into his own adventures, which include an escape with his pal, Jim, a runaway slave, getting mixed up in a blood feud between the Grangerford and Shepherdson families and run-ins with a couple of dubious characters called the Duke and the Dauphin. All of this takes place with the Mississippi as its majestic background. The novel, written at a time when the United States’ longest river was still considered a frontier, was banned in some eastern U.S. towns for its use of colloquial speech.

71. Jules Verne — Around the World in Eighty Days
 This novel has led to numerous adventures, TV series and books, most notably Monty Python’s Flying Circus star Michael Palin’s re-creation of the book for a BBC TV series. Phileas Fogg never leaves the safety of his London club and is of regular habits, which is the main reason his new valet Passepartout decides to work for him. Both of their sedate lifestyles change very soon thereafter, however, following a conversation with club members that leads to a wager. As a gentleman, Fogg set off immediately, traveling eastwards to Egypt, India, China, Japan and the United States, where adventure and intrigue lay at every bend. Hold on to your hats. Will Fogg make it back within the 80 days he has been permitted to circle the globe?

72. Evelyn Waugh — When the Going was Good
 Evelyn Waugh is the only writer that I regularly laugh out loud to when reading. His early novels of English aristocracy—such as Decline and Fall; Put Out More Flags and Vile Bodies—are hilarious, and every writer and journalist should make a special point of reading his novel Scoop. Waugh also was a noted biographer and travel writer. He has written well on Guyana (when he went there, it was British Guyana), Ethiopia and East Africa, among other places. Those books can be found after a hunt, but this volume is more readily available and puts into one volume the pieces of his travel writing that he remained happy with. Notable is his description of the coronation of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and his attempts to be a war correspondent in that country, which at the time was referred to as Abyssinia. If you can find it, his original book on that country, Waugh in Abyssinia, is worth reading just for the pun in the title.

73. Samantha Weinberg — Last of the Pirates: The Search for Bob Denard
 I used to draw pictures of islands—both existing and imaginary ones—when I was a child and remember becoming fascinated by a group of strange dots in the Indian Ocean called the Comoros Island, which sit between Madagascar and Mozambique. It was ruled by the French and now is independent, but its 30 years or so of independence have never been quiet. This book describes the geography, settlements, beauty and history of the islands, while focusing on the four coups that have taken place there, all led by a French mercenary called Bob Denard. Before 1975, he also sparked up unrest in Benin, Yemen and the Congo, where he faced up against Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, although it is unlikely they ever met. When Frederick Forsyth wrote The Dogs of War, he might very well have had Denard in mind.

74. Rogers E.M. Whitaker and Tony Hiss — All Aboard with E.M. Frimbo, World’s Greatest Railroad Buff
 Whitaker, a railway buff and a staff writer for more than 50 years at the New Yorker magazine, is the main force behind this excellent work. It was Whitaker who created the character called E.M. Frimbo, the world’s greatest train traveler and source of information for all things remotely to do with locomotives. This fabulous book recalls the great days of steam trains, when a gentleman never traveled in any other manner. Between the 1940s and ‘70s, invites came to Frimbo for trains that were to travel on their last journeys, on trains that were getting a dusting-off for one last trip and on trains that were, for one time only, to travel on a piece of almost forgotten train line. All told, Whitaker calculated that he had traveled on 2.7 million miles of track.

75. Robert Young Pelton — The Adventurist
 Robert Young Pelton is a Canadian who has carved a niche for himself as the expert on all those places most of us would not even want to see on the map, let alone visit. The author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, he has written on such troubled spots as Liberia, Chechnya, Papua New Guinea, the southern Philippines and Colombia. He has been kidnapped by guerillas on the border between Panama and Colombia and just happened to be wandering in very dangerous places in Afghanistan when American John Walker Lindh was captured fighting for the Taliban. As the U.S. TV news stations scrambled for an exclusive, they were all rather perturbed to see Young Pelton sitting there in interview mode. This book is a collection of his adventures in places fraught with terror, and it makes for fascinating reading, especially the pages on a plane crash that he survived in the middle of a Borneo jungle, the most scary thing of which, according to Pelton, was that he afterwards realized he had enjoyed every second of it.