Best travel book?

I love to read travel books. I am very interested in travelling and other countries and I love to read about the places that other people have visited and their experiences at those places. One of my favourite travel books was written by a Danish family. They travelled around the world for one year and they experienced many challenges during that year, but they also had a lot of interesting experiences while they travelled from place to place. I enjoyed reading about their trip, because it is one of my dreams to travel around the world just like they did. They visited many places in Central Asia and before I read that book I didn’t know much about that area, but the book made me interested in visiting some of the countries in central Asia for instanse Uzbekistan.

As I'm not a great traveller, I never read travel books, although I love the "idea" of travel, and would like to travel extensively one day. Right now, I'm just not inclined to, and can't afford to anyway. But it's something I've earmarked, and I've often thought I'd like to write about my travels. There's something about travel that fascinates, mesmerises me, that notion of complete escape. I can't recall ever having read a travel book per se, but I've read true life books centring on individuals experiencing unusual and precarious situations abroad; and extensively watched documentaries and movies about this too. Just not travel as such. I've also dipped into books centring on urban "travel" on foot; urban wandering - specifically in Paris - as composed by French writers; Breton and Aragon among them.

I liked reading "The Happy Isles of Oceania" by Paul Theroux. He has written some wonderful travel books. I got that book when I was traveling and was in Australia at that time. All these years later I still really enjoy reading travel books. At the moment I am reading "An Odd Odyssey" by Glen Davis Short. It is written about his journey from California to Colombia using buses and boats. He goes all the way through Central America. Interestingly he wrote the book in Cartagena De Indias. That is the place that I visited earlier this year.

I like Bill Bryson. Cos he's really funny! Have you read any of his books? I've read one about this long walking trail from Maine to Florida i think. And also one about England called Notes from a Small Island or something like that. He writes in a way that makes you laugh out loud, and all the commuters around you will be wondering what's wrong with you! I like travel books because they transport you to another world, another culture. And it's also great to get a foretaste of a place that you are planning to travel to. of course your experience might be totally different, but that's what travel is all about.