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To hell with the self-styled traveller, his lofty ethnicity, his disdain for cities, and for the modern (which he doesn't half love back in Sydney) To hell with his risible assumption that he can have something to do with the lifestyles or the
culture of people one hundred times poorer than himself. Let's hear it for the tourist; for the twentyfirst century tourist.

There are, of course different types of travel journalism. Writing about travel is difficult; writing about travel involves decisions as to what we can do with our ignorance. Because how ever old a hand we are there will be an older hand, (delighted to correct any mistake); and so on ad infinitum. Old Hand has a certain style:

"in 1973 I went to China on a flight inaugurating a regular service between Addis Ababa and Shanghai. On board were a number of members of the Ethiopian royal family…" (Eric Newby)

Indeed how else does one go to China?

Old Hand is but one type of travel writer, the original one perhaps. but nowadays we don't want our travel writers to be too knowing; and the travel writers don't want to be either (all that tiresome research). Today there are two newer modes The first of these is Reckless and Mad. Redmond O'Hanlon, for example, in What am I Doing Here? Or Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; the idea of a stimulant-fuelled trip to hell. PJ O'Rourke has one foot in this camp. So did Cassidy and Kerouac; (Or so I thought until I happened upon an early Kerouac book on his travels to England which is Adrian Mole-like in its ingenuousness; I recall sentences like "There were "bobbies" in helmets at Dover" etc. Indeed at his stage of his travel career Kerouac belonged to Travel Writer type 3: Little Me.)

The arch exemplar of Little Me is at present Michael Palin actually a TV journalist, for this is the man who goes travelling all alone around the world with only a camera crew.

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