Travel writing is not dead. Writers from the past such as Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh and Claude Lévi-Strauss said it was. It was even suggested that travel itself was dead. Not true. It has been claimed by several ‘knowers’ that the annus mirabilis for travel writing was in fact 1977, coinciding with the publication of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. Two years earlier,...