Books about travels

It's inevitable that I love books about travels, because I love to travel myself. I've been reading travel books as long as I can remember. Some are good or even great literature as well as accounts of exotic, sometimes unique travel experiences like Thor Heyerdahl's marvellous book, The Kon-Tiki Expedition, or ordinary, almost mundane travels like Laurie Lee's Depression era book, As I walked out one summer morning. This is a beautifully written account of his rambles across England and France to Spain, where he got mixed up in the Spanish civil war. Laurie Lee was a poet, so it's not surprising that this is such a beautifully written book. Sea voyages appeal to me especially because I love the sea so much. Early in my reading life I stumbled upon Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, written in the plain and simple language of a seafaring New Englander. Slocum was the first of many solo seafarers. Some have questioned his truthfulness about his adventures but I believe that everything he says happened really did happen.A travel book that I believe qualifies as literature is Apsley Cherry-Garrard's wonderful account of a winter trek across the ice fields of Antarctica, The Worst Journey in the World. Towards the end of his life I met Cherry-Garrard in London, in 1951. He wore thick-lensed glasses and I wondered whether he had those in the Antarctic winter; but what I remember best are his teeth, cracked and broken by the frostbite he suffered during that winter walk. Eric Newby is a professional travel writer, and The Last Grain Race is hilarious as well as exciting reading. Newby makes frequent adjectival use of the Swedish or Norwegian word for sail-making, focking, thereby evading the prohibition at the time he wrote of the fine old Anglosaxon monosyllable that everyone knows not to utter in the presence of their elderly maiden aunt -- although I recall hearing a very maiden-auntish lady outside Selfridges on Oxford Street in London a few years ago remarking to her companion, "What's happened to our fucking bus," and thinking the same thing myself (we were both waiting for a 73 bus it turned out, when a whole flotilla of 73 buses eventually hove into view). Newby wrote other travel books, including A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush which is packed with fascinating detail about that exotic corner of the world as well as very funny in places. But for a hilarious combination of interesting travel and laugh-out-loud humour, nobody comes close to Bill Bryson. Even when he is being serious, as in The Mother Tongue, his excellent book length essay about the English language, he can't altogether suppress his wit, which bubbles up to the surface from time to time. His travel books have made me laugh out loud on bumpy air flights and enough to wake Wendy when I read one in bed. All are worth reading; I like best his walk around the island of Britain, Notes from a small island,, his walk along the Appalachian Trail, and his travels in my homeland, Australia. But they are all very good, and all very well written, as is to be expected from someone who loves the English language as much as he obviously does. There are so many more travel books I'd like to talk about! But I have work to do, and must get on with it.