Great Travel Writing Offers an Inner Journey

I am currently traveling in India. As I sat in a rocking train, reading Indian author Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, I began to think about how talented writers have informed my appreciation and understanding of foreign places, or helped me to rediscover domestic places. Now travel literature is an old genre, including the travel journals of ancient Greek tourists, medieval Arab raconteurs, Song Dynasty Chinese classics, and Captain James Cook's best-selling diaries. Among more contemporary U.S. writers, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, and Cheryl Strayed's recent Wild stand out for me. Travel writing can also be fictional, although based on real journeys, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. Personally, John Berendt's City of Falling Angels was fascinating preparation for a visit to Venice, Italy, and Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze provided great insight during a recent trip to China. What makes great travel literature stand out? It is not just about the physical journey, although vivid descriptions of natural and man-made sights are important. A really good tale reveals the culture and history of a place on a living, human scale in a way monuments and vistas cannot. It also reveals the inner journey of the writer and takes us along to our own insights about leaving home, about being a stranger in strange lands, about confronting new experiences, ideas and lifestyles. At the end of travels together, author and reader will share some truths about the variety and universality of the human adventure. So, if you are planning a trip, don't just get the maps and guidebooks, look for insights from authors who've blazed the trail. You can start with a Condé Nast Traveler selection of the best travel fiction at http://www.cntraveler.com/features/2008/11/The-69-Greatest-Fiction-Travel-Books-of-All-Time