An extraordinary journey

If I have to choose just one classic, I will take this classic by Wilfred Thesiger. Born in 1910 in Ethiopia to a British family of aristocratic and diplomatic moorings, Thesiger went through the usual Oxbridge education of so many anglophone travel writers, but he went beyond most in his engagement with non-anglophone spaces. Thesiger wrote with his colonial baggage, but at his best he went far beyond it, partly due to an aristocratic tradition of disdaining bourgeois European values. This could be best done when the writer could escape to some ‘remote’ non-European space. Arabian Sands, which is an account of Thesiger’s travels across the deserts with (Arab) Bedouins, is distinguished by its powerful descriptions of a remote, rugged space and an unusual people with a threatened lifestyle, narrated with understanding and perception by someone from a very different background. Understanding across difference is a quality one looks for in travel writing, and one which increasingly misses in contemporary life.