I'd recommend the travel writing of Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, spy, scholar, and all-around erudite Victorian badass.[1]
Burton was famous for being the first non-muslim to see Mecca and Medina (which he did in disguise), when the penalty for non-mulsims entering the holy cities was death. He did the same in other dangerous places as well, taking similar risks. Burton also wrote a famous translation of the Thousand and One Nights (aka Arabian Nights)[2], translated the Kama Sutra and other works.
From a few hundred years later, I would recommend Frederick Gustavus Burnaby's A Ride to Khiva. It's striking how much is the same about travel writing even a century and a half ago - and at the same time this makes the differences all the clearer.
It's a cool-sounding book but let's not go overboard here. Marco Polo? The Grand Tour? Ibn Battuta? Alexander the Great? All the Roman nobility who would take tours of the famous sites in Greece (so much so that Pausanias wrote a length - and now historically invaluable - guidebook)? Hakluyt wasn't even much of a traveler himself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hakluyt
Burton was famous for being the first non-muslim to see Mecca and Medina (which he did in disguise), when the penalty for non-mulsims entering the holy cities was death. He did the same in other dangerous places as well, taking similar risks. Burton also wrote a famous translation of the Thousand and One Nights (aka Arabian Nights)[2], translated the Kama Sutra and other works.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton
[2] - Burton's is by far my favorite translation of the Thousand and One Nights. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg.[3]
[3] - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3435