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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (Im)possibility of Writing a Travelogue 151 mentioned in the text. Ramos thus explicitly undermines the explanatory function of maps, which is commonly made use of in travel writing. As is the case with the written text and the sketches in the book more generally, the information contained in the sketches themselves is meant not to ‘guide’ the reader but rather to give insights into the associations and thoughts of the author when sketching a certain scene/moment. This is most evident in the number of sketches that contain (more or less) complete refer- ences to scientific literature, thereby making the author’s academic background visible in the sketch. In the book, Ramos does not reveal whether the references refer to literature he was reading during his travels or whether these articles and books came to his mind while sketching certain situations. In our email exchange, he made clear that the annotations in the sketches do not necessarily relate to the drawings at all, as while travelling he used his (sketched) notebooks to annotate all kind of things, with no intention of eventually publishing them. It was his first publisher at Assírio & Alvim who had the idea for the book and who selected the sketched pages from the notebook. Only in the English version did Ramos himself rework the pages, mainly by erasing many of the Portuguese annotations (as mentioned above) but also by reselecting and re-ordering them, with some input from the new publisher, Sean Kingston (personal commu- nication with Ramos, 27.9.2020). Ramos does not want to explain anything, let alone pretend to have understood everything he encountered. He uses sketching to fix certain moments and scenes in his mind and offers the reader the possibility of experiencing glimpses of Ethiopia through his eyes. The immediacy Fig. 15: Bibliographic references [matching in Ramos (2010: 15) & Ramos (2018: 48)]