“All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.”
– Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

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When you look up nicknames for Africa you likely won’t come up with much more than “The Dark Continent,” a colonial designation that’s been hard to shake. “Birthplace of Humanity” is both more correct and more dignified for this continent, which, far from being homogenous, is a world unto itself, with variegations of light and dark and every colour of the spectrum in between. And while it’s no longer a destination for elephant hunters à la Hemingway, it still holds a draw as a place of adventure.

Gallery: Destination Africa

The publishing house Taschen has brought out Great Escapes: Africa, another of its “bibles for the travelling aesthete,” as they’ve been called, but you don’t necessarily have to be an aesthete to enjoy a trip to Africa, or to check out this book, which is so beautifully assembled and so visually striking – a photographic expedition nonpareil – the experience of reading it may sate your desire for travel.

All joking aside, the book is a catalogue of dreamlike possibilities, snapshots and capsules of places and spaces spiced with an air of fantasy or fable: a medieval Islamic city complete with mosques and palaces, souks and bazaars; an oasis nestled between a wind-sculpted white mountain and sand seas undulating to the horizon; a manor near Nairobi with friendly house giraffes; a mokoro trip in slo-mo through a maze of waterways edged with papyrus reeds; and wilderness camps in lands of sand and rock “that God made in anger” but inhabited with cape fox, aardvark, springbok and oryx.

As this book demonstrates, if you can imagine a perfect trip, an adventure, a setting, a recreation, a process, Africa can provide it. Feel like checking out a genuine “treasure island”? Welcome to Fregate Island Private, the most remote and secluded of the Seychelles, where pirates came in search of buried treasure. You can dig for lost dubloons here, but the real treasure lies in the rich green land and teeming birdlife, the sea views and coral reef, the cashew and almond trees on the cliffs and the song of the world’s rarest bird, the magpie robin.

And you can go as soft or as rough as you like. Stay in a palace fit for Cleopatra, near the Valley of the Kings, the air fragrant with jasmine and henna. Sleep on a bed canopied in hammered gold and gold enamelling that summons “Sailing to Byzantium.” Spend some time watching lions and leopards watching buffalo and waterbuck. Or take a walk on the wild side with real Bushmen and learn a few traditional bush skills, like making rope from grasses, constructing traps, lighting fires with friction sticks and tracking animals.

Great Escapes: Africa will open your eyes to a vast land still brimming with endless possibility. Sometimes it’s a question of dropping the old epithets and mindsets and experiencing things for yourself.

GREAT ESCAPES: AFRICA
Shelley-Maree Cassidy and Angelika Taschen
Taschen
400 pages
$45

Salvatore Difalco is, among many things, senior writer for TORO and the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories.