Best Travel Writing Books

Bill Bryson travels across Australia — a country he cheerfully admits he knows almost nothing about — and discovers that it is simultaneously one of the most beautiful, most deadly, most overlooked, and most underrated countries on earth.

Peter Matthiessen and zoologist George Schaller trek 250 miles into the Himalayas to study the bharal (Himalayan blue sheep) and their predator, the nearly mythical snow leopard — a physical journey that becomes a meditation on grief, Zen Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness.

New Yorker editor Bill Buford quits his job to apprentice in Mario Batali's chaotic Babbo kitchen, then traces Italian cooking to its source — apprenticing with a Tuscan butcher and a pasta master in Emilia-Romagna.

Bruce Chatwin's account of travelling through Patagonia — the vast, wind-scoured southern cone of South America — in search of a piece of skin he remembered from his grandmother's cabinet, which turned out to belong to a mylodon.

Before moving back to America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson makes a farewell tour of the country that adopted him — by bus, train, and foot, from Dover to the Highlands — in search of what makes Britain lovably, infuriatingly, irreducibly itself.

Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp in India during World War II and, after a twenty-one-month crossing of the Himalayas, reaches Lhasa — where he becomes a tutor and friend to the young Dalai Lama as the Chinese invasion closes in.

Macfarlane descends — into caves beneath Somerset, into the Paris catacombs, into a salt mine in Slovenia, into the bedrock of Finland where nuclear waste will be buried for 100,000 years. A book about what lies beneath: time, death, and the dark matter of the planet.

A practical and philosophical guide to long-term travel — arguing that extended independent travel is not a luxury but a choice, and that most people can afford it if they are willing to rethink their relationship to money, time, and consumer culture.

Peter Mayle and his wife abandon advertising careers in England to restore a farmhouse in the Luberon region of Provence — and spend a year navigating unpredictable tradesmen, extraordinary markets, and a way of life entirely organised around food.

Paul Theroux, one of the great travel writers in the English language, travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town — by bus, truck, ferry, and train — through some of the most troubled and beautiful countries in Africa, forty years after teaching there as a Peace Corps volunteer.

In 1952, twenty-three-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set off on a motorcycle to travel the length of South America — a nine-month, 8,000-mile journey that transformed the future revolutionary's understanding of his continent.

Macfarlane follows ancient paths on foot — the Icknield Way, pilgrimage routes in the Himalayas, sea-roads in the Outer Hebrides, paths through Palestine. A meditation on what walking old routes does to the mind and body, and what landscapes remember.

A desk-bound travel editor retraces Hiram Bingham's 1911 journey to Machu Picchu through the Peruvian Andes, interweaving his own misadventures with the controversial history of the 'discovery' that wasn't.

After a painful divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert spends a year travelling — eating in Italy, praying in India, and finding love in Bali — in this memoir that became one of the bestselling travel narratives of the century.

Actor Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman ride motorcycles east from London through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, and Alaska to New York — 31,000 miles through some of the most extreme terrain on earth.

Gerald Durrell's account of his third Cameroon expedition, during which he collected animals specifically to found his own zoo on the island of Jersey — the origin of what became the Jersey Zoo and Wildlife Preservation Trust.

Anthony Doerr and his wife win the Rome Prize and spend a year at the American Academy in Rome with their newborn twin sons. A memoir about learning to see in a city built from layers of history, trying to write with two newborns, and what the death of John Paul II looks like from inside Rome.

A philosophical meditation on why we travel, what we hope to find, and why the reality so rarely matches the anticipation — structured around de Botton's own journeys and the writers, artists, and thinkers who have illuminated the meaning of travel.

NPR foreign correspondent Eric Weiner travels to ten countries ranked at the extremes of happiness surveys — Netherlands, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Switzerland, Thailand, India, Moldova, Britain, and the USA — to investigate what makes some places measurably happier than others.

Gerald Durrell's first book, an account of his animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons in 1947-48. The book that launched his career and established his voice as one of the finest natural history writers in English.

Frances Mayes, a poet and university professor, buys a ruined villa in the Tuscan hills, restores it with her partner Ed, and discovers the rhythms of Italian rural life — its food, its seasons, its ancient craftsmanship, and its unhurried beauty.