Travel diaries are personal accounts of trips, often written in the first person. They can be handwritten or digital and can include anything encountered on a journey. Some travelogues are fictional, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Gulliver’s Travels, while others are non-fictional, like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Travelogues can be shared through books, travel programs, or the internet. Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an example of an eclectic fictional travelogue.
A travel diary is usually a single person’s account of a trip, journey, or other. We have numerous famous travelogues written by some European explorers. Marco Polo’s work is a good example of his travel and subsequent experience in China during the Mongol ascendancy.
Of course the first travelogue would be handwritten on paper or white paper to chronicle the traveler’s adventures. Such writing is highly individualized and is the experience of a journey seen through the traveler’s eyes. It can include just about anything encountered on a trip: what a person ate, what a person saw, conversations, or notable features of a culture. A personal travelogue is most often written in the first person.
It’s not a bad idea to keep a travel journal, as it can help you remember significant details of a trip later on. Your personal impressions may be for your eyes only, but the trend in travel reporting is now towards sharing this information, either through the publication of books or more commonly on travel programs or the Internet. Some people keep a video diary instead of writing their thoughts in a book. Others use laptops and cameras to record interesting aspects of a vacation or trip. They can then post information about a trip to an Internet travel blog or use their writing to review some of the places they have seen and make recommendations to others who may be visiting the same places.
The travelogue style is not exclusively non-fiction. Many well-known written works are travelogues of imaginary places. Dante’s Divine Comedy is essentially an account of a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and, like many travel writings, is narrated in the first person. Gulliver’s Travels is another early fictional travelogue.
In modern times, numerous novels fit into the travelogue genre. If you want kids to get an idea of what a good one might contain, consider James Gurney’s novel Dinotopia, written like a diary, with insight into a mystical land where dinosaurs and humans live in relative harmony with each other. The story itself is fascinating and the narrator not only records his journey but also uses illustrations (actually created by Gurney) to emphasize different aspects of the culture.
Some of the most interesting works of the 20th century are travelogues, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Robert Pirsig’s 20th-century book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A fascinating 1974 work that captured the imagination of many is Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, a description of Bryson’s walk along the Appalachian Trail, with additional historical detail and hysterical or strange stories about this trail.
Perhaps one of the most eclectic fictional travelogues of modern times was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This is not written in the traditional sense with first person narration. Yet it gives you helpful advice on how to navigate your way through Adams’ imaginative depiction of the galaxy, should Earth be destroyed to make room for a new highway.
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