As a travelogue, the author is fascinated by the philosophies of the places he goes rather than describing the places (his descriptions of India and China are rather bare-bones, even though he travelled extensively by rail. It's nice to find someone who believes like me that a book can be even better than travelling. "With each new title I read, I felt as if I were undertaking a new journey...recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip -in an iconographic journey such as this, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance."
