Voyagers

In Competition No. 2786 you were invited to submit a feature for a travel supplement as it might have been written by a well-known novelist, living or dead.
 
Derek Morgan’s George Orwell is in Paris and insufficiently down-and-out: ‘Although I would have preferred to haul my suitcase on foot from Gare du Nord, a taxi whisked me to Place des Vosges and my nearby four-star hotel with its sickeningly servile staff.’ I also liked Johannes Kerkhoven’s Cannery Row-inspired take on the Argentinian city of Tilcara, and Adrian Fry’s evocation of a Spanish ghost town filtered through Ballard’s dystopian lens. It was a cracking entry. Congratulations all round. The winners take £25. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s.

New Orleans calls itself the Big Easy, but the sultry languor of the bayou is far from being a nerveless or quiescent thing. There is strenuous passion in the hot, bright ease of this place, where the air is moist, heavy and fragrant under the almost tropical sun. One senses the city’s passion in the fathomless intensity of the mighty Mississippi River, whose urgent currents are forever rippling their blind, instinctive caress along the flank of the French Quarter as the softly clamorous waterway slides eagerly toward the fulfilment of oneness with the Gulf of Mexico. One hears and feels it in the jazz pulsating through the Bourbon Street night. A dark beauty throbs in the rhythms of the music, while brilliant, quivering crescendos swirl and jump like flames. There is no lazy complacency in the ease of this Crescent City, but a deep and perpetual restlessness.
Chris O’Carroll/D.H. Lawrence

 
The cathedral in Helsinki is a white building but it is not white like the white of the Andalusian villages in the summer of 1932 when Belmonte fought six Miura bulls in the ring at Seville and the Mayor sent his car to bring Belmonte to a civic reception at the ayuntamiento and Belmonte diverted it to a brothel but could not pass through the cheering crowd who trampled the orange blossom.