Die Wundersamen Irrfahrten des William Lithgow

Written in the first half of the 17th century it is refreshingly incompatible with today’s political correctness. You will laugh a lot about Lithgow’s rigorous, sometimes misinformed and final judgments about foreign people and cultures. He was a Scottish traveller of dubious reputation -apparently he was an unpleasant fellow to live with. For some reason he decides to travel to far destinations at the time. It seems he wanted to describe the world by exploring it. That was his ambition: explaining the world to others by first-hand experience. Besides the funny moments, and there are many of them, he was very methodical. He always described the dimension of the places he visited, what people wear and what they produce. Furthermore, it is surprising what he already knew about the regions he visited. I caught myself many times asking: they knew that already? One of the interesting details is that he was maybe the first westerner, who described the use of coffee in the Ottoman Empire.
The bottom line: a great travel guide of the 17th century. Nevertheless, you wouldn’t like to repeat his experiences: numerous robberies, everywhere you needed to pay a toll to travel, and finally he was tortured by the Spanish Inquisition, and barely survived.