On one of my occasional ventures into the world of travel blogging, I came across "We Are Here" [as of January 2020, the link does not function], which bills itself as "a quarterly travel magazine with a difference", and focuses on one city per quarter. I'm not sure about this format, to be honest. But I was challenged by one of their blog posts, entitled "The Problem With Travel Writing" [link no longer functional].

Their opening broadside is that "travel writing has, for the most part, become increasingly irrelevant". There are two culprits, they argue: travel magazines that are riddled with "brochure copy -- saccharine, cliche-ridden prose designed to sell flights and hotel rooms and tours"; and travel books that "can be filed under 'A Fish Out of Water' -- where someone... goes somewhere exotic and does something bizarre".

Now, I completely sympathize with this. Especially with the latter point. In fact, many years ago, I was planning to write a satirical travel book on exactly this theme. I think my hero was going to travel in a bathtub. I can't remember exactly. Anyway, I didn't do it. Which is probably good, because I can't write satire.

But the area where I part company with this blog post is the author's apparent admiration for "unflinchingly honest writing", "brutal assessments", and "acerbic" observations.

I simply cannot see the point of going somewhere just to dwell on all its negative sides. I've written in another post about an expat who looked blithely past all the amazing beauty and interest of an African street scene, and homed in on an adjacent pile of rubbish as a discussion topic. (This has since happened to me multiple times in different destinations. In fact, I wonder if there's something about my appearance that makes me look as though I'm just dying to sound off about the state of the world's garbage disposal systems.)

Too much acerbity and unflinching honesty, I fear, would end up being the literary equivalent of this expat. Would this be a helpful move in terms of world peace and understanding, or even of reader enjoyment? Personally, I think not.

I gave up reading Paul Theroux for precisely this reason. If you want to create a litany of depression, then just stay at home, and cast your baleful glare on your own place. It seems my decision was a good one. At least I spared myself this.

Nor, incidentally, do I see the point of going somewhere just to find everything funny. Yeah, we get it, those foreigners are just so weird... Now take the patronizing hat off, and tell me something that's actually interesting.

Yet the We Are Here blog post also challenges me to look at my own blogging efforts, and wonder if they, also, are not too "saccharine". I do concentrate on the positive. I don't include (or I abbreviate) the times we got lost, the times places were unexpectedly shut, the boring/hot/cold/uncomfortable bits of the journey, the cultural aspects I find hard to swallow. I largely eliminate these details because I figure they'll be pretty boring in years to come. But does this tendency mean that there's no nutrition in my writing, and it maybe even leaves a bitter aftertaste?

How would I blog about Siberia's "Two-Hour Pass", for example? Would I focus on the triumph at the top, or the never-ending agony and cultural misunderstandings on the way up? Hmmm... Maybe I should try it, and find out...



One of my all-time favourite travel books was The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. Perhaps because of his Buddhist faith, Matthiessen seemed able to just "hold" whatever travel threw at him, whether good or bad. The bad drew no rants, no tut-tutting, no well-meaning suggestions. Just acknowledgment. "This is there. I can see it. It has meaning. But it is not everything." This is the way you deal with disturbances in meditation (or rather the way you SHOULD deal with them: I never mastered it). "This distraction is here. I can see it or hear it. It has meaning. But it does not concern me at the moment."

Another fascinatingly rich travel writer was Bruce Chatwin. I particularly admired The Songlines. No shying away from the negative for him. But full of observation, full of philosophy, full of invention (literally, it seems, sometimes), full of life...

Yeah, well, I'm not going to be Peter Matthiessen or Bruce Chatwin. But I can work on doing what I do just a bit better.