In the steppes of a warlord

I suspect travel writing was once a fairly simple business: the author travelled somewhere, the reader did not; the author explained what the place was like and the reader was duly informed and even entertained. Dr Uno von Troil, for example, went to Iceland in 1772 and served up lurid descriptions of the devil holes and lairs of Beelzebub (geysers). None of his readers had been to Iceland; no one was inclined to argue with Uno von Troil.

Later, with the advent of mass travel in the 19th century, Uno von Troil’s former audience could go by steamer to Iceland (or ‘Hell’) and witness the infernal pools themselves. More intrepid and solitary travellers, such as Richard Burton, were then inspired to write Icelandic travelogues in which they complained bitterly about the tourist crowds and pronounced the geysers far less satanic than billed. Yet, there were many other remote places for Burton to explore, and, unabashed, he promptly went off to explore them.

Now times are hard for the travel writer. Everyone can travel almost everywhere, and blurt out their impressions on Twitter. Meanwhile publishing is busy with the Eschaton and advances are dwindling by the day. Perhaps we shall soon witness the emergence of the Google-Earth travelogue  — one lone cybersurfer, aka a travel writer who can’t get an advance, on a unique (or not quite unique) journey of discovery (or not really discovery) from the cost-cutting base camp of their living
room.

For those who still aim to travel, and even hope to get paid, one option is the doughty sub-genre: ‘In the footsteps of…’ — insert celebrity explorer, family eccentric or, in the case of Tim Cope’s On the Trail of Genghis Khan, legendary warlord and psychopath. There’s nothing really wrong with this sort of formal pragmatism: writers get to travel, publishers stop siphoning whisky into their morning lattes and everyone is, if not happy, then at least not languishing in anomie.