Serendipitous encounters

PICO IYER is the quintessential traveller. Better still, for his myriad fans, he writes exceptionally well, with a unique epigrammatic style that has doubtless evolved from the years he spent honing his skills as an essayist. In his introduction to the book I have noticed this week, a travel anthology called Wanderlust (Villard) Iyer displays his considerable gifts in full measure.

He writes : "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again to slow time down and be taken in, and fall in love once more." There is more insight into why we travel in that paragraph than in most travelogues I have come across.

Iyer's introduction kicks off an absorbing anthology of travel pieces that first appeared on www.Salon.com, one of the best websites on the Internet today (www.Wired.com and www.Slate.com are my other favourites). The anthology is edited by Don George who writes www.Salon.com's weekly travel column "Wanderlust" and was the founder-editor of its award winning travel site. As might be expected, George has a good eye for the best pieces and writers available to him, as a result of which this book is packed with small marvels - Isabel Allende on the Amazon, Carlos Fuentes on Zurich, Simon Winchester in Romania, Po Bronson in the Caribbean and so on and so forth.

Few of the pieces stick to any form of conventional travel writing and might be best described as serendipitous encounters in the course of much longer journeys.

And so you have Simon Winchester chipping in with an account of a poignant joy ride he gives a pretty Romanian girl in a borrowed Rolls; Bill Barich on a student adventure in Florence; Laura Billings on bargaining for Persian rugs in Istanbul; Po Bronson on the astonishingly boring world of Club Med vacations; Wendy Belcher on African travel writing; Fuentes building his account of Zurich around two chance encounters with Thomas Mann, already an eminence grise of literature (and very old to boot) but, yet ,unable to take his appreciative eye off a youthful male tennis player; Amanda Jones on an erotic encounter in a war-torn country; Lisa Michaels with an exceptionally touching account of a meeting with an old bookseller in Turkey who loves books more than anyone else she has encountered but is starved of them in the little seaside town where he lives; Barry Yeoman on his travels with a group of amiable thugs in Cadiz; Douglas Cruikshank on a weekend in an English stately home with Mariah Carey; Dawn Mackeen on her tour of Colombian drug-runner's mansions and so on and on.

The more I read, the more I was sucked in, which surprised me, for, anthologies are usually patchy and by the time you read a third of the book, you have probably read all the best bits.

But this book was different and I read every story, although it would be untrue to say that each attained the exceptionally high standard the best ones set. I cannot think of a better book to take with you if you are travelling during the holiday season. And if you do not take me at my word, I can think of no better introduction to the book than Laurie Gough's chilling story of a holiday on a small Greek island. My personal favourite, but then your taste might run in other directions. No matter, there are more than enough good things in this book to satisfy the most demandingtravel buff.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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