Guardian - Roving The World Can Lead To Interesting Places Including Limousin

Reads to rove about Travel writing has a long and distinguished history. But, in the age of Lonely Planet and the internet, what extra can it offer the armchair traveller and do we get the travel writers we deserve, asks Rupert Wright guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 February 2006 16.54 GMT larger | smaller

Provence: did it deserve Peter Mayle? With the emergence of branded publications such as Rough Guide and Lonely Planet, and the global reach of the internet, most people who want to find out what's going on in a country turn either to these books or to Google. Which begs the question of how relevant classic travel writing still is. And does a place get the writer it deserves? Take Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Yemen. Not only is the author erudite and fluent in Arabic, the book contains this: "Nothing in the world, I thought as I started out along the track, sets you up for a walk as well as a plate of steaming fried liver at six in the morning at 7,000 feet." In one sentence, he tells you about the terrain (high), the cuisine (meat) and himself (ironic, but smart). Some places and writers are clearly made for each other. Equally Argentina could have hoped for no better chronicler than Bruce Chatwin, whose vanity and egotism was a perfect match for the country's own troubled history. In Borneo, Redmond O'Hanlon seems to know more about the wildlife and fauna than do the local head-hunters. In Venice, Henry James, John Ruskin and Jan Morris have all extolled the Serenissima's virtues. It would be hard to find a more exquisite or sexually confused trio to write about a place where even the locals admit that the truth is open to interpretation. To write well about a place, you have to like it or, at least, there have to be elements of the city or country that excite you. Take Tangiers, for example. For a period in the 20th century it was an international zone, a louche city in which homosexuals felt comfortable. When the American writer Robert Ruark visited the city in the 1950s, he said it contained more "thieves, black marketers, spies, thugs, phonies, beachcombers, expatriates, degenerates, characters, operators, bandits, tramps, politicians, and charlatans" than any place he'd ever visited. At that time, half the population was a foreigner. It is no surprise that the people who write best

attracted a different kind of writer. They include slightly deranged, ascetic types, such as TE Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, Eugène Fromentin and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The strength of their writing lies in the depth of their feeling for the subject. It would be hard to think of any of these four writing with a similar passion about Chicago, Lyons or London. This twinning of author and place is even more acute when people choose to live in the country they write about. Karen Blixen went to East Africa to grow coffee, not write a memoir, but is there any better portrayal of the place than her Out of Africa? She, at least, took the precaution of leaving the country before committing her thoughts to paper. Peter Mayle and Provence will be forever linked, even if he was forced to abandon the Lubéron for a while. Older residents are shocked by his facile characterisation of the place and the people. They will tell you that a better account is given in Lady Winifred Fortescue's Perfume from Provence. In fact, the two books are almost identical, despite being written 50 years apart. Lady Fortescue struggles with local builders, admires the olive trees and relishes the local food and markets. Which I guess shows that Provence has never been the place to go to for straightforward home improvements, but it's great if you love olive oil. Many writers have followed Mayle's lead and moved to sunny climes. There is now a whole genre of good life abroad books, from Frances Mayes's Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy to Carol Drinkwater's The Olive Farm to Richard Wiles's Bonne Chance, his account of restoring a house in Limousin. Each of these have their merits, although it is possibly the case that the more complex the place, the more complex the writer it attracts, and vice versa. There is also a new gang of travel writers, who are really comedians passing through. They are following in the footsteps of Bill Bryson, whose bestselling books showed that if you can make people laugh, you can take them anywhere. Tony Hawks had a surprise bestseller with Travels Round Ireland with a Fridge. His latest book to be published this spring is called A Piano in the Pyrenees. It seems he will go anywhere, as long as he has a large, awkward object with him. The latest book doesn't tell you much about the Pyrenees, nor indeed much about pianos, but that is missing the point. Another working the same seam is Peter Moore, who has travelled round France on a bicycle emulating the Tour de France, walked to Santiago da Compostela with a donkey, and even strolled up the Old Kent Road. These books tell you little about the places visited, but the journey does at least give the writers a frame on which to hang their gags. The inventor of the traveller as tourist was probably Robert Louis Stevenson in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. In this classic account he sets out the importance of the journey. He also introduces the comic prop. In his case it is the Modestine the donkey, who refuses to carry his luggage. But he also gives us a very clear sense of the region, together with a sympathetic account of the people that live there. Few places have attracted such a sympathetic chronicler as Greece has with Patrick Leigh Fermor. His scholarly accounts of life in Mani and Roumeli leave you wondering what the place has done to deserve him. Who can fail to thrill to the two-page list of strange communities that Leigh Fermor has met in Greece? And who wouldn't want to emulate the lunch that he shares with his wife Joan and his friend Xan Fielding? It is so hot that they move

the table into the harbour. "The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea..." In a similar vein, Italy was lucky to attract Peter Robb, even if it might find the result a little too truthful. In Midnight in Sicily, not only does he offer a skilful analysis of the links between the Mafia and politicians and identifies an 'espresso line' - the coffee gets better and stronger the further south you go - but he also serves up the most seductive description of a market in literature. Rupert Wright is the author of Notes from the Languedoc, published by Ebury, £7.99 Buy Notes from the Languedoc at the Guardian bookshop

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