Have you ever noticed that the best travel writers never really considered themselves as such?  Look at anybody’s list of favorites and you’ll see names like Kerouac, Bowles, Matthiessen, etc. quite often, along with names like Theroux and Iyer, writers who certainly consider themselves travel writers, but not exclusively.  You’ll only rarely if ever see a guidebook writer.  But there is a historical tradition which goes back directly to Marco Polo and Ibn Battutah , and even Tacitus and Herodotus, before them.  

They did something very important that few writers today even consider in today’s age of blog posts and status updates: they were writing for posterity—even though it wasn’t cast as such.  It was presented as reports from one part of the world to the other, the two (or more) largely ignorant of each other, a situation that is no longer the case...

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