Legendary travel writer Wilfred Thesiger waited more than 60 years before writing The Danakil Diary, a narrative about his Ethiopian travels in the early 1930s. At the time, though, he also wrote a handful of dispatches for the Times of London, and the Times travel section has posted those original articles as part of an ongoing series of “travel classics.” Keep an eye out for more travel content from the Times’ extensive digital vault. The section editor expects to post four or five vintage stories each month.

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* Top Travel Books: No. 1: “Arabian Sands” by Wilfred Thesiger

In an extreme case of touristic vandalism—a very, very extreme case—the 1,700 year-old obelisk had been removed by occupying Italian troops in 1937. According to Agence France-Presse, it will be reassembled throughout the summer.

Photo of Axum Obelisk on display in Rome.

The ancient city of Harar in Ethiopia may suffer chronic water shortages and a lack of modern amenities, but regional politicians are hoping to transform this hilltop city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, into a popular getaway for tourists, writes Anita Powell of the AP. With its walled maze of ancient mosques and alleyways, Harar has enough mystique to stir the imagination of adventurous travelers. The fourth-holiest city in Islam, it’s a center of the faith in the Horn of Africa. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud lived there in the late 1800s, and his home is now an art gallery. Harar is also known as the birthplace of coffee; its scent lingers in the Ethiopian highlands. And it’s also got “an old man who hand-feeds some 50 hyenas every night, treating them like obedient kittens,” Powell writes.

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It’s not a new idea, visiting the countries U.S. President George W. Bush dubbed the “Axis of Evil.” Ben Anderson, for instance, did it several years ago, and the BBC broadcast several programs based on his travels. Now Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler has written “Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil,” in which he chronicles his travels through Bush’s original three “axis” countries—Iran, Iraq and North Korea—plus Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia. 

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Saifa Benaouda’s decision to travel to Mogadishu, Somalia last December blended “naïveté and a love of travel,” according to the New York Times. Her mother has stronger words to describe her actions. During a vacation to Dubai, the 17-year-old Swedish high-school student (her late-father was Moroccan) and her 25-year-old boyfriend Munir Awad (a Swedish citizen of Lebanese origin) agreed it wasn’t to their liking, so on the spur of the moment they decided to head to Somalia. Their timing was awful.

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Coordinates: 14 14 N 40 18 E
Elevation: -157 feet (-48 meters)
If avoiding the heat is your goal, then Death Valley, California—the hottest location in the United States—might be one spot to avoid in late August. Dallol, Ethiopia is another. A small settlement in the
state of Afar near the Eritrean border, Dallol holds the record for the highest average annual temperature for any inhabited place on the planet. In addition to plenty of sweltering sunshine, this part of the African continent also offers an opportunity to see the first signs of a new ocean basin forming. Not far from Dallol in the Danakil Depression north of the Great Rift Valley, the only volcanic crater below sea level has remained silent since 1926 as the seabed it will one day occupy gradually widens.

-- is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1959
Territory covered: Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Arabian Penninsula (now Yemen, Oman, Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates)
Not long after Wilfred Thesiger finished his second crossing of the vast, lifeless swath of Arabian sand called the Empty Quarter, and not long after he narrowly escaped beheading by Ibn Saud for illegally entering his kingdom, the traveler and his thirsty companions stumbled across a small well in the desert. “We tasted the water,” Thesiger wrote, “but it was too brackish to drink; the thirsty camels, however, drank as if they could never have enough. While we watered them a gleam of sunlight flooded across the wet plain, like slow, sad music. Then it started to rain again.” It is a near perfect moment, and for a minute we are there, on the edge of the place Thesiger wrote about eloquently and timelessly in Arabian Sands. Thesiger’s masterpiece spans his five years traveling throughout the region just before the age of oil, when the Middle East was still as it had been for ages, when his Bedouin friends still felt that, “Only in the desert could a man find freedom.” There are many things which elevate Thesiger’s account to the pinnacle of travel literature. There is the window he gives us to Bedouin warmth and generosity and fierceness. There is his beautiful writing about a time and place now gone. And there is his profound reverence for the desert itself. But what really sets “Arabian Sands” apart is Thesiger’s pure love of the journey, of the experience itself. “Here, life moved in time with the past,” he wrote. “These people still valued leisure and courtesy and conversation. They did not live their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless.” Ignoring the obvious romanticism, that notion of trying to live life first hand, of feeling the world for oneself, is at the heart of the urge to travel. At one point, unable to sleep due to some uninvited guests, and feeling “thoroughly ill-tempered,” Thesiger wrote, “I tried the old spell of asking myself, ‘Would I really wish to be anywhere else?’ and having decided that I would not, I felt better.” It’s the kind of thing one has to do while starving in the desert. But also, it is the kind of thing we all might hope to find ourselves doing, because that is what traveling is about. “It is not the goal, but the way there that matters,” Thesiger wrote, “and the harder the way, the more worthwhile the journey.” Arabian Sands is one of the most worthwhile journeys we can take vicariously, and reading it inspires us to find our own hard way. If we’re lucky, we might just find what Thesiger found in the sands. “I had come here looking for more than locusts,” he wrote, “and was finding the life for which I sought.”

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To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1947
Territory covered: Ethiopia, Yemen, East Africa, Guyana and Brazil
In the first part of the 20th century, Evelyn Waugh was one of a handful of bright young writers who headed off into the wild world to propel the genre of travel writing forward. “We turned our backs on civilization,” Waugh wrote of himself, Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, whose early death Waugh mourned. “From 1928 to 1937,” he wrote, “I had no fixed home and no possessions which would not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow. I traveled continuously, in England and abroad.” Armed with trunkloads of wit, an eye for characters and the cocksure attitude of the imperialist he was, Waugh headed to Ethiopia, Yemen, East Africa, Guyana and Brazil. The result was several travel books that went out of print. But the author pulled long excerpts from them, which were reprinted in When the Going was Good. Each is essentially a short travel book itself, including one about the coronation of Haile Selassie and Waugh’s attempt to travel from Guyana to Brazil. It all has a carefree feeling, as Waugh himself admitted. “I never aspired to be a great traveler,” he wrote, “I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we traveled as a matter of course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.”

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