The 5 best travel books

This time I could not stick to 3 cases in my thematic selection of books. Because speaking of travel literature, with the intention of abandoning one's own cultural references, one must take a boat or plane to the 5 continents. Moving between Europe, America, Africa, Asia or Oceania has its point between adventure, romanticism, history and landscape, of course. The point is to load up on the best before hitting the road.

And literature gives us that vision beyond mere guides with gastronomic recommendations. That's what this entry is about, travel books about countries and continents with the intention of making known essences more than routes ...

Because above all the fact of traveling from one place to another points to the necessary mimicry to enjoy the trip, to learn about other customs and to open up to perceptions and idiosyncrasies that can be light years away from our way of seeing life. But that's what traveling is. The rest is sightseeing.

So we go there with those books that can help us to prepare a good trip that makes us live the unique experience during our time in that destination and that serves for evocations of all kinds upon return, as food for a soul grown from that multifocal vision of the world.

Top 5 best travel books

Travel books in Africa: Africa Trilogy, by Javier Reverte

It is always good to start with the closest thing that is not always the best known. The African continent awaits us as a wonderful place once the Atlas mountain range has been climbed. Nobody better than Javier Reverte to guide us through many unique spaces in diverse Africa ...

• The dream of Africa it is already a classic in Spanish literature in recent years. Since it was released in 1996, it became a bestseller, and was considered by readers and critics as the pioneering book that re-founded and reopened the tradition of traveling literature in Spain. Today we cannot talk about travel literature in our country without naming this great precursor book to so many others.

• On his second trip to the African continent, Javier Reverte toured South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Rwanda and Congo to leave us a shocking new story about the mystery of Africa and the risk of traveling through unsafe territories. The innumerable battles fought in South Africa, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 or the horrors suffered in Congo, when it was almost a personal estate of King Leopold II of Belgium, are some of the historical facts that the author goes through with a harsh and beautiful prose, epic and lyrical at the same time, which concludes brilliantly with the navigation through the waters of the gigantic Congo River.
• En The lost roads of Africa, Javier Reverte's third African journey, the author takes us to the territories of Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, regions near the course of the Nile. As is usual in his traveling texts, the writer makes us walk by his side with naturalness, tenderness, curiosity, insight, humor, passion, and a deep understanding of the human. And in the style of his two previous books, together with the faces, voices and perfumes of the road, Reverte brings us closer to singular episodes of African history, to make us better understand the drama and greatness of the continent.

Travel books in Asia. The Great Railway Bazaar Paul Theroux

Everyone suffers that crush on the country or place of their turn. In the case of Theroux, many of his books bring us closer to that Asia that we always discover in spiritual aspects but also in customs maintained with unsuspected devotion until today. Theroux wrote many other travel books about China or other sub-Asian countries and also about American routes. But in this case he took the train to see very disparate landscapes on a longitudinal tour of almost all of Asia.

The chronicle of a trip through Turkey, the Far East and Siberia, with the train as a meeting place, which inaugurated a new genre of travel literature. As a child, Paul Theroux has not been able to hear the whistle of a train without feeling an overwhelming desire to get on it. However, unlike the traditional traveler, who uses this means of transport in a purely utilitarian way to reach his destination, what Theroux is interested in is the railways themselves. He wants to know all of them, and for this he proposes to go from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo, jumping all that he finds in his path.

Travel books in America. The open veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano

Forget America. We live in a cultural environment and an imaginary replicated on this side of the Atlantic compared to the USA. I do not mean that a trip to the cosmopolis par excellence, New York, or to a town in Kansas is the same or does not contribute anything, because all travel is discovery. But without a doubt we have much more to know from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. And without pointing to the pretentiousness to point out a book that brings us closer to such an extensive route, we do make this selection because it is outlined as a guide that rescues the shared feeling of today's America between old colonies and failed self-governments ...

«In America we all have some original blood. Some in the veins. Others in hands. I wrote my veins to spread other people's ideas and my own experiences that perhaps help a little, to their realistic extent, to clear up the questions that have always haunted us: is Latin America a region of the world condemned to humiliation and poverty? Condemned by who? God's fault, nature's fault? "Will not misfortune be a product of history, made by men and which by men can, therefore, be undone?" Eduardo Galeano

Travel books in Oceania. Journey to Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia, by Gerald Durrell

After a journey of 72.000 kilometers and six months, GERALD DURRELL gathers in this book the adventures and observations of his TRIP TO AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND AND MALAYSIA. In line with the exposition of the disastrous effects of human intervention on the ecological balance, altered by agriculture, forest clearing, hunting and mining, the great naturalist presents the tuátera (survivor of a prehistoric reptile and endowed with a pineal eye), the New Zealand turnstone, the koala, the platypus, the Sumatran rhinoceros, the mythical flying dragon and the leatherback turtle, and recounts the funny adventures and unforeseen incidents that punctuated his long journey.

Travel books in Europe. Travels through Europe, by Emilia Pardo Bazán.

It is not easy for a European to point to that book capable of extracting particularities and at the same time forming the perfect melting pot among so many countries of a Europe that is increasingly atomized in backgrounds as well as uniformed in forms. But if we have been daring when it comes to selecting works for other continents, we have to do the same with old Europe. Here we go…

This book of Europe travel, Emilia Pardo Bazán includes My pilgrimage, from 1888, At the foot of the Eiffel tower y For France and for Germany, from 1890, Forty days at the Exhibition, of 1901, and half in which it speaks of Belgium, Portugal and France of For Catholic Europe, 1902. These are books that EPB published at the time as a compilation of correspondent's chronicles that he had written for the newspapers The Impartial, The Nation (from Buenos Aires), and others, during the trip to Rome on the pilgrimage organized by train to attend the jubilee of Leo XIII, or during the long months of the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1889, (when the Eiffel Tower and the great Gallery of Machines were erected), and that of 1900, or the research tours on the politics of Catholic governments in the Netherlands.