The best travel writing prepares you for what a place is really like

“The best travel writing prepares you for what a place is really like, and consequently gives the reader who will never travel there an accurate ground-level portrait of it. Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (1999) provides a much more vibrant picture of the dissolution of rural Russia after the collapse of communism and the advent of Boris Yeltsin’s cold-turkey democracy than the Moscow-centric reporting in the most prestigious newspapers of the period. If one wants to know about how sub-Saharan Africa is actually doing, forget the newspapers and read Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari (2003), which demonstrates how finely wrought observations of people and landscapes offer the best kind of political and social analysis. Theroux describes bus and train stops, lawless borderlands, and urban nightmares, as well as individual beauty, honesty, and friendliness. Whatever the prejudices of Theroux and Thubron, at least they are the result of direct contact with the evidence — uncontaminated by contact with a clerisy of specialists, clustered in nearby foreign capitals. As Jack London put it, “They drew straight from the source, rejecting the material which filtered through other hands.”
–Robert D. Kaplan, “Cultivating Loneliness“, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan-Feb 2006