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Livingstone & Stanley: Journey into Africa

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Mid-nineteenth century saw multiple explorations of Africa by European explorers. Nothing obsessed these explorers more than the quest for finding the source of the Nile which, to this day, is under contention. One such exploration was led by David Livingstone in 1866, a veteran who had already spent twenty years in Africa and whose past adventures had sparked such awe and who exercised a strong influence on attitudes towards Africa in Victorian England. Livingstone did not succeed in this quest to find the origin of the Nile - John Hanning Speke had earlier claimed that honor - but this epic journey over seven years, intertwined with an equally audacious exploration by Henry Morton Stanley (more on it later), had such an impact on our understanding of Africa and provided a detailed journal on what an expedition looked like in the 19th century.  Livingstone was already a household name at that time and his disappearance early on during this mission sparked huge distress and many explor
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The map of the motorcycle diaries

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Ernesto "Che" Guevara along with his friend Alberto Granado set out on a travel around South America in Granado’s motorcycle Norton La Poderosa II in 1952 from Buenos Aires. When they started the trip, they were just two adventurous souls keen on taking a semester off to see the world that they had only read about in books. Over the next seven months, Guevara would visit Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and witness social and political injustices that would have a profound impact on him, the history of Latin America, and the history of the modern world. His story is more a discovery of self. This is not a political article. In this article, we track the footsteps of Guevera and Granado with the curiosity of an adventurer, a traveler, and a history buff. Guevera, in an alternate universe, would have become a great traveler and a travel writer as evidenced by the eloquence and knowledge with which he describes the experiences of his travel. In my favorite line f
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The Travels of Marco Polo

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What makes someone a great traveler? Some of the factors, in my humble opinion, include longevity of travel, cultural sensitivity, perseverance in the face of danger and failure, ingenuity to get out of tricky situations, level-headedness to take both good and bad experiences in one’s stride, being grateful for the opportunity to travel, and most of all, the sheer love for travel and discovery. Marco Polo personified all of this. In addition, he was lucky to chronicle his travel experiences in detail. Polo met with Rustichello da Pisa – in prison - together with whom he compiled “Livre des Merveilles du Monde”, in English commonly called “The Travels of Marco Polo”. The below map takes one through the journey that Polo took from 1276 to 1291. Click on the markers which will pop up to provide additional details and commentary. Notes: Each leg of Polo’s journey is highlighted in a different color. Polo did not visit Kharkorin and Baghdad listed in this map. The two places are only marked
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