Until now, the study of travel writing has mostly focused on the visual ‘gazes’ on foreign people and places. Challenging the longstanding neglect of non-visual sensations, this project will analyze the interplay of sounds, tastes, smells, and textures in non-fictional published travel accounts. This approach will be applied to the sensation of arduous landscape types in Southeastern Europe and Western Asia recorded by countercultural travel writers in French, English, German, and Dutch during the interwar years. The project aims to determine which material, intellectual, social, and textual factors shape the narrated experience of landscapes. These factors will be explored through four different paths of research that draw on the material history of travel practices, interdisciplinary sensory studies, an actor-centered approach, and the upcoming narratology of the senses. Our ambition is to delineate a tradition of travel writing which – influenced by movements such as primitivism and vitalism – proceeds from a ‘wandering’ mode of travel, foregrounds all the senses, and accordingly features alternative ways of knowing, emotionally responding to, and textualizing foreign environments. This project will therefore not only revise ocularcentric histories of travel writing, but also pioneer a sensory method to study this genre and contribute to the understanding of landscape experience in the interwar period.