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.
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.
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.
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?
The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/
reply