Travel writers: get away from it all

I realised today that I despise travel writing.

It happened in a Waterstone's, hunting down a newly-paperbacked Neal Stephenson. Passing the 'crap writing A-Z' section, I saw one titled 'Fried egg and chopsticks' or something - take one guess what the cover photo was.

I didn't even need to glance inside; the title said it all. It's one of those trite, look-at-me-aren't-I-clever, glorified diaries written by people who think the ability to get on a bus in a place where they don't speak the language somehow makes them special. Who think that having a different skin colour and a better credit rating somehow qualifies them to sum up whole civilisations on their laptop screens. Well, it doesn't, and it's about time someone said something about it. So...

Note to travel writers everywhere: I DO NOT WANT TO READ ABOUT WHAT YOU DID ON YOUR FUCKING HOLIDAYS!!!!

Maybe it's just that I've spent so much of my life overseas (oops, they've got me doing it now); but whenever I read a travel book I'm yawning within paragraphs. I can tell, from Page One, just what the book's about, where it's going, and how it's going to get there.

Look, most of us got sick of that 'Wot I did on mi holidays' stuff in junior school. Some few, perhaps longing for a childhood they wish to return to, continue writing such essays later in life, and call themselves travel writers. People desperate for approving attention, who probably still stick their hands up when the boss asks a question during a meeting. People who really, deep down, just want a gold star and an A+ at the bottom.

Well, here's your report card from me, you snivelling little twerps:

YOU ARE NOT FUCKING INTERESTING! SNAP OUT OF IT!

Your 'hilarious escapades' and 'cultural misunderstandings' do not demonstrate you're a footloose adventurer living life on the edge; they just prove you're a bumbling idiot who couldn't be bothered to prepare for his trip properly. That 'gruelling trip' (trips are only 'gruelling' for travel writers; the rest of us quite enjoy them) across the 'vast plains of this troubled region' (the only thing that 'troubled' it was your presence within its borders) on which you formed a 'strange kind of friendship with a toothless old man' (NO YOU DIDN'T!!! YOU JUST TOOK HIS MIND OFF HIS HAEMORRHOIDS!) - it all screams the same message as a thousand others when committed to paper. An ultra-smug feeling that nobody else experiences life quite as deeply as the writer, that their 'quirky approach to life' is worth an ISBN and charging money for.

Travel writers are condescending by nature, because they automatically put themselves several social strata above the people they write about. Here's a thought, travel writers: try travelling among your OWN people, and see if you feel the same sense of smug faux-wonderment at equivalent cultural events:

"My adventures began with a gruelling trip from the little-known areas of southeast London, taking the No. 7 bus to Russell Place. As the ancient Routemaster snaked through the endless Council estates of this troubled region, I formed a strange kind of friendship with the hooded young man opposite, who was carving exotic patterns into the PVC of the seat with a Stanley knife. Not speaking generational code, I could not understand his drug-addled, semiliterate mumblings, but when he threw the contents of a red cardboard packet at me - fried potatoes cut into oblongs, a staple of these people - I realised he was offering me food, and that I must give something in return. For a dreadful moment I thought my laptop - with all its precious writings! - was the only gift with which I could complete the transaction, but as he gestured with the Stanley knife in the age-old manner of his people, I somehow persuaded him to settle for my mobile phone."

Among the worst travel writers are white Americans - because everything they write is through the narrowest of cultural contexts: they see only the differences that keep us apart, not the similarities that can draw us together. Here's a thought, waspish ones: try going for a hamburger on the rough side of town, and see if you can keep my attention writing about THAT. As an American abroad, you are the most cossetted, overprotected human being within the city walls; back at home you're the same as everybody else. Can your writing survive when the crutch of the exotic gets swept away? Almost certainly not.

In fact, there's only one subgenre of travel writing worse than Americans abroad, and that's British people (always 'Brits' in this permanently jolly section of the bookshop) who've made a home in France or Spain, and then written books about... making their home in France or Spain. Go on, read them. They're practically written to a template. There'll be a chapter on the 'dramatic decision' to move abroad, followed by the chaos of moving 2.4 snot-nosed children a couple of hundred km (yeah, those EasyJet check-in queues are really bad, huh?) Then there'll be a chapter devoted to discovering problems with the heating/cooling/plumbing, where, we are assured, the 'overseas adventure' nearly came to an end, there and then. (The way these people write about a burst pipe, you'd think every house in the Dordogne is permanently on the brink of collapsing into a pile of dust.)

After that they'll document family arguments. (Husbands and wives quarrel over money and interior design - oh, be still, my heart.) Next come the 'trials and tribulations' of getting the kids into local schools, followed by the joy - or despair - of cooking your first dinner with homegrown vegetables. And at the end, a reflective chapter written a year later, in which they tell us about their now perfectly normal life, or agonise about the events which led to them giving up and going back to the UK ('Blighty'.) Either of which makes the book COMPLETELY FUCKING POINTLESS.

GROW UP, PEOPLE! THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DOING IT! YOU. ARE. NOT. SPECIAL!!!

(Three and a half million working adults in the UK are functionally illiterate; they have problems catching the No 7 bus, yet somehow many manage to work, draw wages, and support families. Now THAT'S hard. THAT'S something I'd read a book about, except - well, you get the idea. But a middle-class educated family driving onto a ferry to 'escape the rat race' or the 'pressures of fast-paced London life'? Do they fucking expect me to applaud that? Nowhere do they ever reflect that most people don't have the choice.)

What's worse is that travel writing has been so much better. 'Travels around my bedroom' is a masterwork. Tocqueville's America or Hemingway's Spain evoke real people and real cultures; even Gibbon's Rome is at heart a work of travel writing. These people were driven by the experience of travel, not the need to convince others how great they were.

So perhaps... all the travel writing the world needs, has already been done. In fact, I'd go further: there is NO good travel writing being done today, anywhere in the world. For the same reason there are no good oral histories in development, and no great cave-painting subculture. Times have just moved on. In a world of £10 flights and broadband, the only piece of travel writing anyone needs is a train timetable; we can do the rest ourselves.

Let's face it, travel writers are just bloggers who sniffily think they're something more. But if more of them did real blogging - putting their prose on the web, for free, having to gain an audience for themselves, taking commented criticism on the chin - they'd discover just how crap they all really are.

So if you're truly 'curious about the world', travel writer, try travelling to your local Waterstone's and looking in the fucking Remaindered bin. You'll see how many of your books are in there.