You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR.

I'm Gregory Warner.

Okay, I'm gonna admit this.

I have felt so travel starved at points of the pandemic

that I've taken to flipping through guidebooks,

lonely planet, rough guides.

Maybe I'm dating myself here,

but it is an odd experience to read a guidebook

of a place that you are not planning to visit.

You almost notice how casually prescriptive the advice can be.

It tells you not just where to eat, but what to order.

Not just what to see, but how to feel about it.

And maybe who you'll meet along the way.

Let me find it.

Togo.

Okay.

N'Jalla Nia Bolov is an academic and writer from Kenya.

She read me from a guidebook she bought

when she was a university student,

making her first trip to an African country outside her own.

She was headed to Togo, the long skinny country

between Ghana and Benin,

...