Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
as glorious about foreign cultures. Their touchstone was Marco Polo, the grandfather of all
travel writing. When his
Description of the World
was published around 1300 the Italian
public thought Polo's description of China under Kublai Khan was utter fantasy. The tales
of the Khan's lavish court, his palaces of marble, gold and silver, his benevolence toward
his subjects, his bizarre invention of paper money and the precise details of the enormous
bridges and roads he built across his empire were ridiculed as impossible.
Two hundred years later, Christopher Columbus carried his well-worn copy of Polo's
masterpiece on his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of China. That spirit of ad-
venture jumps off of the pages of the earliest guides. Admittedly, travel in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was for the elite or the professional diplomats and coloni-
al bureaucrats who could spend weeks admiring the ancient wonders like the pyramids.
Travel was considered such a privilege that people spent months in preparation, relying
on their guidebooks to find hidden paths and a bed for the night. The German-based
Baedeker travel guides published a handbook in 1876 for
Jerusalem and Its Surroundings
that captures the day-by-day account of how to travel by horseback to the Holy City. “At
a fig-tree our path is joined by another from the left, and reaches the village of Biddu,
surrounded by heaps of stones and destitute of trees. This scene is a foretaste of the stony
wilderness of the ancient Judah.”
Once in Jerusalem, the writer warns with an honesty missing from today's travel writing
that it is “only by patiently penetrating beneath the modern crust of rubbish and rotten-
ness which shrouds the sacred places from view that the traveler will at length realize to
himself a picture of the Jerusalem of antiquity.”
For the next eighty pages, the Baedeker describes the holy city's history and sights in
vivid commentary, detailing the scholarly basis for its descriptions of the buildings and
monuments. Practical information on hotels, restaurants, banks, consulates, pharmacies
and tailors takes up less than two pages. For the handbook for Egypt and the Sudan pub-
lished two years later, Baedeker hired nearly a dozen scholars—historians, archeologists,
linguists—to write about Egypt's art, history, religion and hieroglyphics. He included a
nineteen-page dictionary of “essential” Arabic words and expected the traveler to spend at
least four weeks in the country to fully appreciate what they were seeing. Nothing should
be missed: “The Sphinx, the guardian of the sacred enclosure of the Second Pyramid is
a colossal recumbent lion with the head of a king wearing the royal head-dress. . . . The
head is now deplorably mutilated; the neck has become too thin, the nose and beard have
been broken off and the reddish tint has almost disappeared. But in spite of all injuries it
preserves even now an impressive expression of strength and majesty.”
By today's standards, the writing in these topics is more stuffy than lyrical, but the guides
were complete. In those days, if you made only one trip to Peking or Rome, you wanted to
inhale as much history and culture as possible and be prepared for every possible mishap.
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