Looking at the author's work for West Africa, when is it a travel guide and not just a diary in travel guide format?
Though it's a bit frustrating to read how close he gets to some genuine understanding of how things really work in West Africa, and misses it in preference of expecting everything from a Western perspective. Noting a lack of tourists then bemoaning the difficulty of accessing few and lackluster tourist sites? OK, well, supply and demand work both ways.
Tourist sites and national parks across West Africa, where wildlife is very, very rarely the draw, are typically organized as jobs programs for whoever happens to be stuck in the area forbidden to be used for normal farming and village-life purposes. You don't pay a guide to guide you on an easy hike, you pay a guide to legitimize your presence in the community, to keep other people from bothering you, and to make sure that if you get bit by a snake or something, that you're not alone. That guide might simply be the young guy that speaks the best English in the village nearby and 99.9% of their time is spent living normal life doing things that have nothing to do with tourism.
All the friction the author notes is specifically employed as personal income generation, and it's odd how rarely does the author recognize that. Then they pay the universal "expedited visa" bribe in every country because they have mighty plans that no nation shall change.
A good lot of them seem to be from Matt Lakeman, whose writing I highly recommend. He goes into detail about history, politics, and tries to understand why things are the way they are in the places he travels.
I like to collect old travel guides to places that don’t really exist anymore. A few interesting ones I have are Polish-language guides to the USSR and Yugoslavia, and a multi-lingual guide from East Germany for shipping organizations dealing with western countries. It has basic nautical phrases in 8 or 9 languages.
They are the kinds of books that aren’t re-printed and usually aren’t worth digitizing either.
I recently found out about the ancient roads in China. These days they are hiking paths. I'm quite used to handling myself alone with a GPS track, I don't want a guide. I found one book that it's not remotely clear if it's got what I want as it's discussing much of China and it's old enough I'm not sure what the mapping info will be like.
What is the benefit of writing a negative travel guide for a place? And then the choice to list one in a compendium. The second guide for the farow islands is depressingly bad.
For Seoul, I think this is an interesting observation:
Seoul is not a pretty city, at least not by most Western standards of beauty.
It is a sprawling, haphazard mix with little apparent cohesion beyond a shared culture.
Personally, I really liked it because it has a different vibe from a more "sterile" city like Tokyo.
While planning the trip, I was annoyed by redditors on r/askswitzerland ending almost all replies by asking folks to download the SBB Mobile app. To my surprise, even though I'm not the kind to install apps (let alone Flutter apps), it was god-sent. So well made (their "design system" is open source: https://github.com/SchweizerischeBundesbahnen/design_system_...). Makes travel up and down the country, from Zürich to Lugano, from Genève to St. Gallen, from Basel to Campocologno, stress-free.
For tourists, TooGoodToGo.com (mystery meals) & SwissTopo (trails) are equally neat.
It looked cool, and I thought that it might be a new community where articles belong to this site. But when I clicked two articles, Seoul and Singapore, both were behind paywalls. So it seems it's just an aggregation of internet articles it seems?
Looking at the author's work for West Africa, when is it a travel guide and not just a diary in travel guide format?
Though it's a bit frustrating to read how close he gets to some genuine understanding of how things really work in West Africa, and misses it in preference of expecting everything from a Western perspective. Noting a lack of tourists then bemoaning the difficulty of accessing few and lackluster tourist sites? OK, well, supply and demand work both ways.
Tourist sites and national parks across West Africa, where wildlife is very, very rarely the draw, are typically organized as jobs programs for whoever happens to be stuck in the area forbidden to be used for normal farming and village-life purposes. You don't pay a guide to guide you on an easy hike, you pay a guide to legitimize your presence in the community, to keep other people from bothering you, and to make sure that if you get bit by a snake or something, that you're not alone. That guide might simply be the young guy that speaks the best English in the village nearby and 99.9% of their time is spent living normal life doing things that have nothing to do with tourism.
All the friction the author notes is specifically employed as personal income generation, and it's odd how rarely does the author recognize that. Then they pay the universal "expedited visa" bribe in every country because they have mighty plans that no nation shall change.
A good lot of them seem to be from Matt Lakeman, whose writing I highly recommend. He goes into detail about history, politics, and tries to understand why things are the way they are in the places he travels.
The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/
For the wiki version, you have https://www.wikivoyage.org
It can be a bit outdated, but then you just update it as you do your research ;)
I like to collect old travel guides to places that don’t really exist anymore. A few interesting ones I have are Polish-language guides to the USSR and Yugoslavia, and a multi-lingual guide from East Germany for shipping organizations dealing with western countries. It has basic nautical phrases in 8 or 9 languages.
They are the kinds of books that aren’t re-printed and usually aren’t worth digitizing either.
Yeah, amazing what's not easy to find.
I recently found out about the ancient roads in China. These days they are hiking paths. I'm quite used to handling myself alone with a GPS track, I don't want a guide. I found one book that it's not remotely clear if it's got what I want as it's discussing much of China and it's old enough I'm not sure what the mapping info will be like.
You'd probably be better off not trying to navigate using GPS in China in the first place, given the whole mapping situation there.
Most popular hiking apps (Gaia GPS, AllTrails etc.) support the standard used in China, do you think people just navigate with paper maps there?
You made me curious and I found this article detailing some background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
I wrote my own piece about South Korea / Seoul: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/south-korea-travel-guide
Felt like it's worth sharing here!
What is the benefit of writing a negative travel guide for a place? And then the choice to list one in a compendium. The second guide for the farow islands is depressingly bad.
Thx, great read about Yemen from Maciej Cegłowski https://idlewords.com/2014/07/sana_a.htm
The Dominican Republic one is really detailed and surprisingly accurate, down to the pig on the moto! Come visit again soon :)
https://mattlakeman.org/2021/11/08/notes-on-the-dominican-re...
- Another travel guide with absolutely no mention of India on it anywhere
- You guys really need to see the Lavie and Ollie series they did on India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1SJc2CyIek&list=PLefdZaa6fW... They did a 10000 km road trip across multiple videos.
- It ll blow your mind how a single country has a desert, a tropical forest, snowfall and more
It's just an aggregator, if you have anything good to contribute why not just follow the link in the footer? "Please send further submissions..."
Thanks for pointing out, yes I've been watching their videos lately and I must say they have covered almost every place in India on bikes.
Craig Mod is great for Japan https://craigmod.com/ !
One of my favourite writers. I fully recommend him.
For Seoul, I think this is an interesting observation:
Personally, I really liked it because it has a different vibe from a more "sterile" city like Tokyo.
Seoul is such a huge place with tons of different areas that each could be a city by itself.
Edit:
I just checked the (sadly paywalled) beginning of the article and the author also says:
> [...] alley of small apartments and trucks selling garlic, the next you’re in a modern business park so sterile it feels like a doctor’s office.
Cool website, might want to change the icon from the current lovable icon.
For Switzerland, for someone who likes railways, I found this guide (missing from guide.travel) to be quite nice: https://www.seat61.com/train-travel-in-switzerland.htm
While planning the trip, I was annoyed by redditors on r/askswitzerland ending almost all replies by asking folks to download the SBB Mobile app. To my surprise, even though I'm not the kind to install apps (let alone Flutter apps), it was god-sent. So well made (their "design system" is open source: https://github.com/SchweizerischeBundesbahnen/design_system_...). Makes travel up and down the country, from Zürich to Lugano, from Genève to St. Gallen, from Basel to Campocologno, stress-free.
For tourists, TooGoodToGo.com (mystery meals) & SwissTopo (trails) are equally neat.
It looked cool, and I thought that it might be a new community where articles belong to this site. But when I clicked two articles, Seoul and Singapore, both were behind paywalls. So it seems it's just an aggregation of internet articles it seems?
Anything for India and Nepal?