I'd add Owen Lattimore's Desert Road to Turkestan: Lattimore traveled through the Central Asian deserts with a camel caravan in the 1930's, one of few westerner

I'd add Owen Lattimore's Desert Road to Turkestan: Lattimore traveled through the Central Asian deserts with a camel caravan in the 1930's, one of few westerner's ever to do so; and also Richard Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, about the first European explorers to enter that region.