What to Read and Watch Before a Great Journey: Building Context Before You Arrive

There is a version of the Peru trip where you stand at the Sun Gate and look down at Machu Picchu and think: that is very old, and very dramatic, and quite crowded. And there is the version where, because you have read John Hemming's account of the Spanish conquest, and John Rowe's work on Inca urbanism, and Pablo Neruda's poem 'The Heights of Macchu Picchu' — in which the poet climbs the mountain and addresses its ancient stones directly — you feel the weight of all that history, the silence of what was lost, and the extraordinary fact of standing where you are. The view is identical. The experience is entirely different.

Preparation through reading and watching is not about studying for an exam — it is about arriving with your attention already tuned to the right frequency. A novel set in a place you are about to visit, watched or read in the weeks before departure, does something to the landscape of the imagination that no guidebook can replicate. It populates the destination with interiority. The streets acquire characters; the light acquires a particular afternoon quality; the food carries a history. This is the preparation that most guidebooks do not tell you to do, and it is the most rewarding kind.

How to choose: the principle of the primary source

The most useful pre-travel reading is the primary source rather than the secondary commentary — the novel set in the place rather than the overview of the country's literary tradition; the first-person account of the expedition rather than the history of exploration in the region; the memoir of someone who lived there rather than the travel essay of someone who passed through. Primary sources are harder to find and require more effort, but they produce a qualitatively different understanding: you see through particular eyes, in a particular moment, with particular stakes. That specificity is what makes the preparation stick.

The secondary principle is relevance to what you will actually see and do. A multi-week journey through Peru, Bolivia and Chile invites a different reading list than a week in Kyoto. For Peru, the conquest-era chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega (mixed-race son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, writing in the seventeenth century) sit alongside José María Arguedas's twentieth-century novels of indigenous Andean life; for Kyoto, Junichiro Tanizaki's essay 'In Praise of Shadows' and Arthur Golden's novel (for the Gion quarter) sit alongside Donald Richie's decades of careful Japanese observation. The list does not need to be long — three or four well-chosen works, read slowly, are worth more than twelve superficial ones.

Reading for Peru, Bolivia and the Andes

John Hemming's 'The Conquest of the Incas' (1970) remains the definitive account of the Spanish destruction of the Inca empire — scrupulously researched, compulsively readable, and essential context for anyone standing at Cusco, Sacsayhuamán or Machu Picchu. It is a long book, but its account of the execution of Atahualpa, the sack of Cusco, and the tragic figure of Manco Inca holding out at Vilcabamba will permanently alter what you see when you look at those stones. For the natural landscape of the Andes, Charles Darwin's 'The Voyage of the Beagle' (1839) contains his Chilean and Peruvian observations; for the Atacama and the altiplano, the Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz offers a stranger, more mystical perspective.

Paul Theroux's 'The Old Patagonian Express' (1979) is an account of a train journey from Massachusetts to Patagonia — mordant, occasionally difficult, always acute — that covers many of the landscapes of the South American continent. Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia' (1977) is more myth than report, but it is one of the great travel books, and its treatment of southern Argentina and Chile creates an atmosphere that no photograph quite captures. For the ancient history, Brian Fagan's 'Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade' and various works of Andean archaeology bring the pre-Columbian world into focus in ways that make the ruins come alive rather than stand mute.

Reading for East Africa, the Serengeti and the Rift Valley

Karen Blixen's 'Out of Africa' (1937) — written as Isak Dinesen — is a complex and beautiful memoir of her years on a coffee farm in Kenya, and whatever one makes of its colonial framing, it contains passages about the African landscape and light that are unsurpassed in travel literature. Peter Matthiessen's 'The Tree Where Man Was Born' (1972) is a quieter, more ecological book about East Africa, concerned with the relationship between the land and the people and animals that inhabit it, and it prepares the eye for a different quality of attention than most wildlife books. For the Serengeti specifically, Bernhard Grzimek's 'Serengeti Shall Not Die' (1959) — both the book and the documentary film that won an Academy Award — tells the story of the migration and the fight to protect the ecosystem with a clarity and urgency that is still relevant.

For the human history of the region, V. S. Naipaul's 'A Bend in the River' (1979) is set in a central African country rather than East Africa specifically, but it captures the post-independence complexity of the continent with a devastating clarity. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novels — particularly 'Petals of Blood' (1977) — give an East African perspective from inside. For Ethiopia (a separate journey but closely related in landscape and history), Ryszard Kapuściński's 'The Emperor' (1978), an account of the fall of Haile Selassie, is a masterpiece of observed political collapse — and the Lalibela rock-hewn churches demand a reading of Ethiopian church history before you stand in them.

Film and documentary: when the image is the argument

Some places are better approached through film than through text, because what they offer is primarily visual and atmospheric. Werner Herzog's documentaries — 'Encounters at the End of the World' (2007), filmed in Antarctica, and 'Grizzly Man' (2005), filmed in Alaska — offer a meditative, philosophically charged engagement with extreme landscapes that no preparatory reading quite matches. Herzog is interested in human beings at the edge of their capacity, which is a useful pre-departure sensibility for any expedition journey. His Antarctic film in particular, available on most streaming platforms, is almost required viewing before a Southern Ocean voyage.

For Japan, Yasujiro Ozu's films — particularly 'Tokyo Story' (1953) and 'Late Spring' (1949) — do something to the texture of Japanese domestic space and the quality of Japanese attention to time and seasonality that guidebooks cannot. Akira Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai' (1954) and 'Rashomon' (1950) are both set in historical Japan and give a visceral sense of the landscape's relationship to its culture. For Morocco, Bernardo Bertolucci's 'The Sheltering Sky' (1990, based on Paul Bowles' 1949 novel) captures the particular quality of the Saharan light and the destabilising strangeness of deep desert travel. For the Silk Road, the BBC documentary series that have covered Uzbekistan and Central Asia — including Joanna Lumley's journeys — are imperfect but accessible.

The single book for each great journey

If a traveller has time for only one book per destination, these would be among the most defensible choices. For Peru and the Inca world: Hemming's 'The Conquest of the Incas'. For Patagonia and the deep south: Chatwin's 'In Patagonia'. For Antarctica: 'The Worst Journey in the World' by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922), an account of Scott's final Terra Nova expedition that is among the finest books ever written about extreme endurance — it will make you grateful for the relative comfort of a modern expedition ship. For Japan: Donald Richie's 'The Inland Sea' (1971), a journey by ferry through the smaller islands between Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu that is as much meditation as travel book.

For the Silk Road and Central Asia: Colin Thubron's 'The Lost Heart of Asia' (1994), a journey through the newly independent post-Soviet Central Asian republics that is one of the most beautiful pieces of travel writing of the last half-century. For East Africa and the Serengeti: Matthiessen's 'The Tree Where Man Was Born'. For the Atacama and the altiplano: the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's collected poems give a sense of the landscape through the eyes of someone who was formed by it. For Egypt: Amelia Edwards' 'A Thousand Miles Up the Nile' (1877) — a Victorian woman travelling by dahabiya (a sailing houseboat) before the great temples were crowded — still reads as fresh and acute observation.

How to build a pre-departure library

The ideal pre-departure reading programme runs for six to eight weeks before departure — long enough to absorb the context, not so long that the details fade. Start with the single history or overview that gives you the skeleton of the place — its political and cultural formation, its relationship to empire and to independence, the events that shaped it — and then move to the more intimate: the novel, the memoir, the first-person journey. End with the poetry, if there is good poetry available in translation, because poetry does something different from prose: it tunes the ear to the music of a language and a landscape without requiring understanding of every word.

On the journey itself, carry one book rather than five — and choose it for density and re-readability rather than coverage. A book that rewards re-reading (Chatwin, Theroux, Matthiessen) is more useful on the road than a comprehensive overview that you will never open twice. Leave space for the books you find at your destination: a used bookshop in Cusco or a hotel library in the Atacama will often surface something you could not have predicted needing, and the best serendipitous reading of a journey is frequently the most formative. The best prepared travellers we know travel with an empty shelf in their luggage, reserved for what they have not yet been told they will need.