One of the things I love about travelling is taken with me a solid book that will resonate with what I'm doing, even though on the surface there is no relation between the lived and the read experience.
Untl now, I thought the book par excellence for this was Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, which I had the good fortune to take with on a trans-continental camping trip 40 years ago. The short journal entries were perfect reading for the end of the day or in rest time on sweltering afternoons. Darwin was in his mid-20s when he set out on his five year, around-the-world trip as a dining companion for the ship's captain and amateur naturalist. His observations are frank and fresh, and slowly one can see his questions about the age and history of the world and its creations deepen and taken him places he had no expectation of going.
But Ryszard Kapusincinski's Travels with Herodotus comes close. In it the Polish writer and journalist who died in 2007 at 74, gives an account of his travels with perhaps the first history of the world, written by a peripatetic Greek who wanted to see things first hand. Kapusincinki left Poland for the first time in the 1950s as reporter for the Polish news agency, carrying with him Herodotus's book, which has much that is relevant now.
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