Original Tour

A modern-day purveyor of international travel adventure and learning promises such experiences as a three-week “President’s Journey by Private Plane to Africa,” “The Maya and More,” “Hiking, Biking & Water Sports on the Galapagos islands,” “On the Silk Road in Central Asia,” “The Best of the Rockies by Rail: Western Canada’s Splendor,” and “Discover Lima, Sacred Valley & Machu Picchu.” There is much more. Prices? In the thousands per person, even $90,000 and up for that first one to circle the African continent.

People do these trips and have moments in history recounted to them by tour guides and even qualified educators. They are helped to imagine what the sites and cultures occupying them might have been like before tourists came to hike and bike on hallowed grounds. But, classic books of the actual period do better than that. They document what actually was then, which could have been recorded only then, and, when borrowed from a public Library, they are free to the reader. How about that for a deal?

Often do I tell this story: A friend once announced to me that she and her husband had plans to go to Machu Picchu. I asked if she had already read Hiram Bingham’s “Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and Its Builders.” Never heard of it. He is Hiram Bingham of Yale University who chopped his way through previously uncharted territories in 1911 to find this most famous of Inca cities. And that made him famous too. “Lost City” is a wonderful read, one that puts you in the moment on an expedition that cannot ever be matched by a modern-day train ride to, and tromp in comfort through, the grounds. And it has photos from the period.

Charles Darwin visited the Galagos Islands in 1835 during his five-year-long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle as naturalist. He wrote a now classic book about the voyage and the visit. A book that gives meaning to the islands’ significance in understanding evolution as Darwin came to articulate the proposition. It is his “The Voyage of the Beagle.” In no way can that experience be richly understood by just a jaunt around the grounds in 2025.

Francis Parkman, America’s historian of historians, saw the American west, if not the Canadian, and its native Americans of the mid 19th century, when he was only 23, as we today cannot. He wrote vividly about that 1846 experience in “The Oregon Trail (1849),” and everything changed so rapidly thereafter. There are lesser known, more recent works about the Canadian west, too, such as Peter C. Newman’s “Company of Adventurers” in two volumes: I. “The Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company” (1985) and II. “Caesars of the Wilderness” (1987).

Merriweather Lewis and William Clark saw the American west of 1804-1806 as we now can hardly imagine it without reading their own day-by-day journal accounts in “The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition”; it comes in three volumes (originally four) as edited by Elliot Coues (1893). These books that I have named here, these tours, are adventures of a lifetime. There is no way now to live the full experiences left to us on their pages, in full color, no matter how hard the international travel purveyors may try.

If you do not buy that, try out one of the books. You still might want a modern tour, which is OK, but at least you will start with having been on the original, because that is what those books are, the “original tour.”