Bill Bryson's African Diary

Travel literature is travel writing aspiring to literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for... the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or may involve travel to different regions within the same country. Accounts of spaceflight may also be considered travel literature. Literary travelogues generally exhibit a coherent narrative or aesthetic beyond the logging of dates and events as found in travel journals or a ship's log. Travel literature is closely associated with outdoor literature and the genres often overlap with no definite boundaries. Another sub-genre, invented in the 19th century, is the guide book. Early examples of travel literature include Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, and the travelogues of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Batutta , both of whom recorded their travels across the known world in detail. The travel genre was a fairly common genre in medieval Arabic literature.
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