Just like the act of traveling itself, exceptional travel writing can profoundly broaden our understanding of the world and our place within it. It introduces us to unvisited places and unfamiliar faces, expanding our perception of the planet and, when done well, leaving an indelible mark on us.
For me, the first book that achieved this was Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, published in 1978. It transported me to a grueling Himalayan expedition, immersed me in Buddhist philosophy, and offered a poignant portrayal of a family’s emotional unraveling.
Matthiessen’s reflections deeply moved and transformed my life, inspiring a leap of faith to pursue a career in travel. Fortunately, that leap was rewarded, leading to a lifelong career editing and writing travel stories for publications like the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, Salon, Lonely Planet, National Geographic, and the BBC.
After sifting through this season’s new and upcoming travel books, I’ve discovered six titles that possess a similar power. Each one rekindles a sense of wonder and expands our idea of what travel can truly be.
1. Best for Wide-Horizon Nomads: Free Ride by Noraly Schoenmaker
Noraly Schoenmaker’s Free Ride chronicles a 20,000-mile motorcycle odyssey that began with a journey from India to Malaysia, then evolved into a solo expedition through the Middle East and Central Asia, finally leading her back to her homeland in the Netherlands. Initiated by a broken heart after discovering her live-in partner’s long-term affair, the journey became a path of reinvention.
This passage, set in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains, captures the rigor and reward of Schoenmaker’s odyssey: “I was freezing, I was scared, I was alone. But at the same time I realized: there was nowhere in the world I would rather be than right here. Despite the hardships of the cold Pamir, I had fallen instantly, completely, and head over heels in love with this part of the world. It felt like everything that had happened – my destroyed relationship, the forced sale of my house, my attempt to become a filmmaker – were all part of a bigger plan to get me here. Here, alone, on the Pamir. I wanted to stay here forever, in this wilderness.”
With no-frills, heartfelt prose, Schoenmaker crafts exhilarating evocations of rarely visited landscapes and unforgettable portraits of remote villagers and their off-the-beaten-path homes. As she motors on, she vividly describes the bone-jarringly rutted tracks, frighteningly flooded roads, breath-sucking winds, freezing high-altitude passes, broken motorcycle parts, and multiple mishaps she must overcome. What truly shines through this moving and inspiring account, however, are the qualities that enable her to persevere: her optimism, openness, determination, resilience, ability to connect with strangers, and comfort in her own company.
The profound truth at the heart of this pilgrimage offers a soul-expanding lesson for us all: because Schoenmaker embraces the world with warmth and wonder, the world embraces her just as fervently and fully in return.
2. Best for Long-Haul Seekers: Northbound by Naomi Arnold
Naomi Arnold’s Northbound meticulously charts her nine-month solo trek along New Zealand’s 3,000km Te Araroa trail, from Bluff at the country’s southern tip to Cape Reinga in the far north.
Setting off on Boxing Day 2023, Arnold’s extraordinarily grueling odyssey takes her through some of New Zealand’s most remote and rugged landscapes. Her account overflows with detailed observations, pulling the reader directly into the heart and hardship of the trail—in all its mud, pain, cold, and beauty. Arnold blends these descriptions with keenly honest evocations of the challenges she overcomes, from blisters and fungal infections to loneliness and logistical missteps.
As her journey unfolds, her perceptions and transformations acquire a luminous intensity, as seen in this passage from the middle of her account: “I spent the day climbing from the valley floor up a long, steep ridge to 1462m Mt Crawford. I walked through rainforest, admiring pīwakawaka and miromiro leaping among the dripping rimu, mataī, mamaku, the trees laden with huge balls of moss, the ground covered in ecstatic bursts of crown ferns. Spiderwebs caught between trees were glistening with diamonds of moisture, shivering in shafts of white-misted sunlight…. This low light changed everything. It hit one thickly moss-covered tree and I could suddenly see the tree’s real shape, its skeleton, strong beneath its fuzzy green exterior, illuminated like a pair of legs through a sunlit skirt.”
Northbound is a beautiful, brave book: at times harrowing, yet brimming with hope. Ultimately, it’s about much more than simply walking the length of New Zealand—it’s about what Arnold discovered, and what she shed, along the way. In this sense, it speaks to the boundless possibilities that await us all in life, and that we can choose to either ignore or wholeheartedly embrace.
3. Best for Road Travel Romantics: On the Hippie Trail by Rick Steves
Long before Rick Steves became a household name, he was a young piano teacher filled with wanderlust. In 1978, he embarked on a journey from Istanbul to Kathmandu along the legendary “hippie trail,” filling his notebook with observations of a world in constant flux.
On the Hippie Trail is a lightly edited version of that journal, presenting Steves as a passionate young man falling in love with the world, bursting with delight at its dangers and disappointments as much as its treasures and pleasures. Steves’ wide-eyed innocence and infectious enthusiasm are evident on every page, as are his clear-eyed depictions of local rites and idiosyncrasies—all foreshadowing the travel icon he would become.
Consider this description of central Kathmandu: “I lost myself in Durbar Square. This was a tangled, medieval-ish world of tall, terraced temples; fruit and vegetable stands; thin, wild and hungry people praying, begging and going through rituals; children, oblivious to it all, playing tag among the frozen Buddhas; rickshaws; and bread carts. Ten years ago, the only blemishes of our modern world – cars and tourists – weren’t there and the sight would have been pure. But even with long, straggly-haired, lacy, baggy-clothed freaks lounging on stony pagoda steps, and the occasional honking taxi, this was a place where I could linger.”
Full of such observations and excitements, On the Hippie Trail rekindled my own memories of early wanderings that expanded my world. In doing so, it also robustly recharged my sense of wonder, that promise that once suffused every day: tantalizing, life-changing possibilities awaited around the next corner.
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4. Best for Spiritual Pilgrims: Fiesta by Daniel Stables
Alternately rollicking and reflective, Daniel Stables’ Fiesta profiles the most fascinating and eye-catching festivals around the world—and what they reveal about the fundamental human need for ritual and connection.
Driven by a deep fascination with the topic, Stables spent a decade studying and attending festivals. In the book, he identifies 11 festival types—from identity to altered states, tribalism to utopia—and brings them to life through immersive fieldwork and personal experience.
He dances with whirling dervishes in Turkey, joins Carnival in Venice, and reflects on the spiritual ecology of the Green Gathering in Wales. Part of the book’s charm lies in Stables’ deep dive into anthropology, history, psychology, and folklore, and his insightful analyses of the motivations and meanings behind the rituals and beliefs he encounters. An equally great pleasure is the way he wholeheartedly throws himself into these events, resulting in some seriously alcohol-fueled and ego-surrendering adventures, all recounted in suitably soaring prose.
Here he describes the culmination of a Romani community festival, as a statue of their patron saint, Black Sara, is carried into the Mediterranean by a parade of pilgrims on white Camargue horses:
“The sound of hooves gathered on the promenade; those of us standing on the sand turned to face the approaching cavalcade, then bent down as one, rolling up our trousers, taking off our shoes and holding them in our hands as we joined the march into the water. Sara was carried until her pallbearers were chest high in the drink, and those handsome horses gathered around her in an imperious array, pale bellies touching the ocean, their riders hoisting iron Camargue crosses, guardian tridents, and velvet standards of deep burgundy…. I am not Romani nor Catholic, but I have rarely felt more alive than I did that day. Riding a white horse across the sand, necking plum brandy, and running barefoot into the sea in the caravan of gypsies – these are things which make life voluptuous.”
5. Best for Close-to-Home Travelers: Go West by Steve Silk
Steve Silk’s highly entertaining account of his bicycle trip through England and Wales, Go West, powerfully demonstrates that you don’t need to journey to the far corners of the planet to have a world-expanding travel experience.
Silk—who works for the BBC’s Look East—set out to pedal from London to the Welsh coast in just eight days. He describes the goal of this quest early in the book: “What exactly is my kind of journey? I guess it’s the kind of slow travel that revels in the places in between. Exploring the kind of towns and villages that you bypass by car, but that you won’t, don’t, or can’t ignore on two wheels. And my emerging Law of Cycling Serendipity suggests that it’s these locations that provide the unexpected highlights; the supporting actors who somehow steal the show.”
Silk calls this mode of travel “undertourism,” and it offers valuable lessons for us all. By moving slowly, he’s able to notice and savor countless details he would ordinarily zoom past: a transporting evensong at Oxford’s Merton College; Witney Blanket Hall, a fascinating blanket-making museum-cum-workshop-cum-café whose sign tantalizingly advertises “Woollen Blankets and Throws, Coffee, Pies and Assemblies since 1721”; a 2,500-year-old yew tree in Defynnog; a mossy, mushroomy, wooded valley on the outskirts of Talog that seems to embody the very essence of Wales; and the particular pleasures of “gongoozling”—that is, “idly watching the passage of boats from the side of a canal, particularly from a lock or bridge.”
For me, the wholesome message of Silk’s transcendent two-wheeled odyssey is the joy of traveling slowly and close to home, and the profound truth that the closer we look, the more we truly see. If we embark on our journeys with the right mindset, a wide world of wonders awaits discovery, even in our own figurative backyard.
6. Best for History Buffs: Small Earthquakes by Shafik Meghji
In Shafik Meghji’s Small Earthquakes, the journalist and travel writer traverses landscapes from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego and Easter Island to South Georgia. His aim is to reveal the overlooked yet profound—and remarkably enduring—connections between Britain and Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
Drawing on over 15 years of travel and research in the region, Meghji brings to life a vivid collection of places (forgotten ghost towns, rusting whaling stations, isolated railways built by convicts, and tea rooms in Welsh-speaking Patagonia) and characters (daring pirates, Victorian missionaries, rogue MPs, polar explorers, and Patagonian cowboys).
The passion and poignancy of his prose are beautifully captured in his description of Orongo, a ceremonial village on the southernmost tip of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). First, Meghji paints a portrait of the site: “Inside are rows of low, oval-shaped houses built from basalt blocks, each with a low entrance barely high enough to crawl through. With a volcanic crater behind, sheer cliffs in front and the seemingly endless Pacific beyond, Orongo feels like it sits on the edge of the world. As I soaked up the view, I realised that beyond the island’s shoreline, there was no one within 1,200 miles.”
He then describes the village’s role as the endpoint for the annual Birdman competition that determined the island’s spiritual leader. Finally, weaving history with heartfelt reflection, he writes: “Despite Orongo’s history, scenery and sheer sense of remoteness, I was most struck by an absence, an empty space in one of the larger buildings that once held Hoa Hakananai’a. One of Rapa Nui’s iconic monolithic moai, standing more than eight feet tall and decorated with Tangata Manu symbols – including stylised figures, birds and vulvas – the statue is held at the British Museum. He was the first moai I saw in the flesh, a sight that tattooed itself on my brain as a child, helping to fire a life-long love of South America before I was old enough to question why the statue was there in the first place. In the Rapanui language, I later learned, Hoa Hakananai’a means ‘lost, hidden or stolen friend’.”
Combining the immediacy of a travel memoir with the depth of a scholarly history lesson, Small Earthquakes illuminates how Britain helped shape these nations through economic ventures, cultural exchange, and political intervention, and how those regions in turn have reshaped Britain, from the Falklands conflict to canned Fray Bentos pies.