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Recently in Salon Travel

Vagabonding
Adventures in the skin trade
Our correspondent's brothel tour of Phnom Penh takes some unexpected twists.
By Rolf Potts
[06/22/99]

My sacred place
For an introspective wanderer, a two-room flat in a generic Japanese suburb offers all the possibilities of a traditional shrine.
By Pico Iyer
[06/19/99]

Wanderlust
Love on the line
On the road, the rest of the world can begin and end in a stuffy phone booth.
By Diane LeBow
[06/18/99]

Travel Advisor
Saving money in Williamsburg
Our expert offers advice on family deals at the colonial attraction, plus safety in Indonesia, smoke-free Vegas and hot-air balloons.
By Donald D. Groff
[06/17/99]

Book Bag
Heart of darkness
An accomplished writer journeys deep into the twisted plight of the orangutans of Borneo -- and the humans who would save them.
By Don George
[06/16/99]

Complete archives for Travel

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"I am surprised that you omitted 'Danziger's Travels,' by Nick Danziger. The intrepid Danziger went by train, bus, hitchhiking and foot from England to Turkey to Syria to Iran to Afghanistan to Pakistan to China to Hong Kong in the mid-'80s. His trip included hair-raising travels through Afghanistan in the company of the Mujahedeen during the height of the Soviet invasion and being one of the first Westerners to go from Pakistan to China over the Karkoram highway."

"I am surprised that no one mentioned either Eric Hansen or Gavin Young. Hansen has published three books (I haven't read the last one). The first is the best: 'Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo,' published in 1989. The second, 'Motoring With Mohammed,' is a bit uneven, but a fascinating read about Yemen, one of the least-known places on earth, even today. In 'Slow Boats to China,' Gavin Young undertook a journey from Greece to China by whatever kind of boat he could find going in the right direction. It was difficult then, impossible nowadays. Young is a journalist and a very entertaining writer."

"I'm not a big fan of the genre but fell into S.J. Perlman's 'Westward Ha!,' with illustrations by Al Hirschfeld, a hilarious and fascinating account of these two making a grand tour in the late 1940s."

"I recommend 'Nine Pounds of Luggage,' by Maud Parrish. As a teenager Parrish ran away from a dull marriage to the dance halls of Alaska and never stopped wandering, traveling from China to South America, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific and back again, traveling for no reason other than that she just had to. She didn't set out to be a writer and it wasn't until late in life that she wrote down her experiences with the help of the letters that she had sent to friends and that they had saved. At the end of her book she's in her 60s, hoping to yet see Afghanistan and Turkistan before her own final chapter."

"I have liked everything I have read over the years by Lawrence Durrell. I had an excavation near Alexandria, Egypt, in the late '70s and read 'The Alexandria Quartet' while there -- I still regard this as an underappreciated literary masterpiece and one of the most successful evocations of place ever written."

"Sir Edmund Hillary's 'High Adventure,' his first book, is engagingly naive and in some ways downright lousy, but it includes his first impressions of Nepal (the year before the famous ascent, as well as that year) and is filled with his own warmth. Mildly self- censored (he announced the summit of Everest with a cheery "We knocked the bastard off" that in the book is referred to as crude slang) and almost as funny as Eric Newby on the subject of meeting Great British Explorers (would they dress for dinner?)."

" 'Annapurna,' by Maurice Herzog, is the story of the first ascent of any 8,000-meter peak, when they actually had to find the mountain in order to climb it, which again is what makes it a travel book rather than just a climbing book. And then the climb -- which damn near killed him."

"Robert Byron's decidedly trenchant and brilliantly witty 'The Road to Oxiana' is everything one might expect from an esteemed and eccentric Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. This account of his astoundingly arduous and peril-filled trip through Iran and the more remote reaches of Afghanistan in the "golden age" of travel is rendered all the more poignant in the light of the author's early death in action during WWII and the thought of what might have further emerged from his pen. I might also mention Norman Douglas' inimitably colorful 'Old Calabria' and, while it is not usually classified as a travel book, Curzio Malaparte's tragic and bizarre journeys around WWII Europe in 'Kaputt.'"

"Charles Nicholl's 'The Creature in the Map: Sir Walter Raleigh's Quest for El Dorado' is impossible to classify. Part history, part biography, part travel, it's a brilliant book."

"Simon Winchester's 'River at the Center of the World' is a good mix of travel and historical fact/current facts."

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