Travel

John Simpson quotes Humbert Wolfe’s mischievous lampoon but makes it clear that, in spite of the somewhat disobliging title of his book, he does not accept it as fair comment. You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God! The British journalist. But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to. John Simpson quotes Humbert Wolfe’s mischiev- ous lampoon but makes it clear that, in spite of the somewhat disobliging title of his book, he does not accept it as fair comment. Himself one of the most resourceful and determined of journalists, he believes that most of his colleagues were and are hard-working and conscientious, anxious to

I was sitting recently with a former US marine by one of the huge open windows on the top floor of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. Our drinks were being served on shiny black tables, and at the bar was a group of rather podgy prostitutes. There is something seedy but fun about the hotel, which reeks of new money: not unlike Saigon — as its inhabitants persist in calling Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon, and indeed Vietnam, has been transformed since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union unravelled and the Hanoi politburo was forced to water down its rigid Marxism. The cycle rickshaws, peddled by thin men who

If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? There really is no place quite like it, a surreal time capsule largely devoid of mobile phones, cars and electric light; a land presided over by the world’s first hereditary Communist, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, whose deceased father remains Eternal President of the place I like to call the ‘Land of Eternal Happiness’. Less charitable types have described North Korea as like ‘Upper Volta

Award-winning poet Ruth Padel established her prose credentials with her autobiographical travel book, Tigers in Red Weather. Journalist Aatish Taseer trawled his own past and background for his memoir, Stranger to History. Now they have produced first novels connected by both dislocation and location — India, though they deal with very different versions of the subcontinent, viewing it from opposite, culturally shaped perspectives. Padel’s Where the Serpent Lives moves between a tangle of human relationships and an environment under threat. Writing about nature, she brings a poet’s intensity to her prose: objects, plants, and the wildlife that stalk her pages, are all fiercely observed. Her narrative spirals like a tropical

Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, lies on a marshy bay encircled by mountains. It was founded in 1749 by the colonial French and named after a vessel, Le Prince, which anchored there about 1680 (and not, as the dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier apparently liked to believe, after The Prince by Machiavelli). Thousands subsist in shanties built on landfill at the harbour’s edge; even a light rainfall can put their homes under flood. Uptown, an illusion of space prevails. The presidential palace, a vast lair of power, stands at one end of a palm-fringed plaza. On Tuesday, 12 January, Port-au-Prince teemed as usual with cigarette vendors, bootblacks and marchandes. On the Rue

Geoff Dyer is the least categorisable of writers. Give him a genre and he’ll bend it; pigeonhole him and he’ll break out. Clever, funny, an intellectual with a resolutely bloke-ish stance; irreverent and incorrigibly subversive, this is the man who set off to write a study of D. H. Lawrence and came up with Out of Sheer Rage, a rant against academia in which Lawrence figured as a spear-carrier. His book about jazz, But Beautiful, started life as a critical study, and in its final form combined laconic history with poignant vignettes; short stories that uncovered the heart and soul of the music. Fiction as truth. His most beguiling book,

It is so sad to read about the Mato Grosso now, at least it is for anyone who, like me, was a boy in the 1950s. When the vast rain forest of the Amazon makes the news at all it is in stories about economic predation, logging and genocide. The Mato Grosso has shrunk and become a victim, which for us was the ultimate in adventure, romance, and horror, with all of it so safely far away. For it had everything: lost cities in the jungle, lost treasures, lost wisdoms, as well as savage tribes which could shrink your head to the size of a cricket-ball, snakes as long as

If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin Torolsan’s informative text explores the inspiration behind such gems as a classical wooden yali on the Bosphorus; a rustic chalet in the mountains; a tea-planters mansion on the Black Sea; a Cappadocian cave-dwelling, with beautifully hewn piers and arches. We are also given a peek into the lives of some of Turkey’s leading figures, including