Anyone tiring of the charms of the Costa del Sol should consider the freshest travel handbook title: Kabul. "Mere months after a shaky peace returned to Afghanistan, shops may soon be stocking guides to the latest hot destination," explained Wanderlust (April-May), in a snippet tastefully headlined, "A load of Kabul".
The publisher, Bradt, is something of a specialist in guides for the hardier traveller. It is planning a North Korea volume, and its Iraq book has flown off the shelves. Turn the page, and Iraq sits at the top of Wanderlust's list of the bestsellers at Stanford's book and map shop. Whether this is thanks to those with a yen to wander or those who simply wish to sit and wonder is debatable - the most popular maps are: 1. Iraq and Kuwait; 2. New Zealand Travellers' Road Atlas; 3. Baghdad; 4. Middle East; 5. Congestion Charging London.
The tourism industry has, of course, been dealt a severe blow by recent events. Wanderlust's editorial drew attention to "the individuals on the ground" in countries affected by conflicts. "Travellers will find new frontiers and the big operators will adapt. But in those countries abandoned by them both, the porters, postcard sellers, waiters, tour guides and myriad other professions who have come to depend on the international visitor will be facing a far more difficult future. Perhaps they should be added to the casualty figures, as collateral damage."
The reverberations of war are felt in Travel + Leisure (May), too. The US magazine's annual Europe edition felt "anti-American sentiment is rising across the continent". In surveying the history of Americans' European travels, Michael Gorra confidently concluded that the current mood - "when we may fear being reviled for our nationality on a continent whose culture we share" - would pass. It is true that the rift over war in the Gulf "left each side with grave doubts about the other, with the fear that our interests - or maybe just our governments' interests - now diverge, in a way that they haven't for a half-century and more", said Gorra. "Yet those debates - those doubts - have also revealed the degree to which we remain each other's interlocutors, and in the end our disagreements recall nothing so much as the doubts of marriage itself." But might this not prove a terminal tiff? "However disagreeably America and Europe may now strike each other," Gorra concluded, "a divorce remains unthinkable."
In National Geographic Traveler (May-June), Daisann McLane proffered a defence of jet lag - that is, the state of mind and body after a long-haul flight, when one feels "suspended somewhere in the fuzzy interlude between here and there". The virtue of this altered state, McLane suggested, is that it lets you relate to travellers of the past. "Reading the travel literature of a century ago, what always impresses me are the physical challenges of travel in past eras, compared to the relatively swift and painless journeys of our modern age," she said. "Jet lag connects me to those great and intrepid travellers of the past. And in that transitional space where my internal rhythms and external reality have yet to align, I begin to detach myself from the old and familiar, and prepare for the new, the strange, and the wondrous."
If you're not getting a good hit from jet leg, try seasickness instead. The floating hotel industry, said Condé Nast Traveller (May), is burgeoning, with a 6% increase in sea-faring Britons in 2002, "the 16th successive year in which the market has grown". Operators are targeting younger people with enticements such as on-board circuses and "'alternative' comedians". Even Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of EasyJet, EasyCar, and EasyEverything, is getting set to sail - all aboard the EasyCruise. Whether or not it will be a race up the gangplank to secure the best cabin remains to be seen.
