The title is a small bow to the parent of all guide books, the Red Michelin, whose rare three-star restaurants are simply designated ‘vaut le voyage’. The marginally lesser, but still hugely coveted, two-stars simply mérite un détour … pleasing litotes in an age of promotional hyperbole.
In the following passages either the whole journey or part of it did not merit either the voyage or the detour.
Mark Twain wrote as a journalist to amuse his American home market, always ready for banter at Europe’s expense although even Twain was eventually beguiled by Venice. Rudyard Kipling took the chance for a counter-punch a few years later. Redmond O’Hanlon did not get the answer he expected from his friend. John Gimlette expected changes in Paraguay that never occurred.
John Betjeman laments the changes that had occurred to Cornwall in the previous twenty years.
‘… you must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis’
REDMOND O’HANLON
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and
the Amazon (1988)
Redmond (b. 1947) is a man of legendary bonhomie but also a special acclaimed expert in natural history, launched apparently by reading Darwin in bed by torchlight as a schoolboy. He claims to prefer his secondary career of filmmaking to writing: ‘It’s all done for you: no more privations, no more suffering, never being alone, no chance to get really depressed, a lot of drinking. Wonderful.’ He has a particular talent for opening chapters. Here he is preparing for an Amazon adventure.
Having spent two months travelling in the primary rain forests of Borneo, a four-month journey in the country between the Orinoco and the Amazon would pose, I thought, no particular problem.
I reread my nineteenth-century heroes: the seven volumes of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1799–1804 (1814–29); Alfred Russel Wallace’s A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853); Henry Walter Bates’s The Naturalist on the River Amazon (1863); and Richard Spruce’s Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes (1908).
There are no leeches that go for you in the Amazon jungles, an absence which would represent, I felt, a great improvement on life in Borneo. But then there are much the same amoebic and bacillary dysenteries, yellow and blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera, typhoid, rabies, hepatitis and tuberculosis – plus one or two very special extras.
There is Chagas’ disease, for instance, produced by a protozoon, Tripanozoma crusii, and carried by various species of Assassin bugs which bite you on the face or neck and then, gorged, defecate next to the puncture. When you scratch the resulting itch you rub the droppings and their cargo of protozoa into your bloodstream; between one and twenty years later you begin to die from incurable damage to the heart and brain. Then there is onchocerciasis, river-blindness, transmitted by blackfly and caused by worms which migrate to the eyeball; leishmaniasis, which is a bit like leprosy and is produced by a parasite carried by sandflies (it infects eighty per cent of Brazilian troops on exercise in the jungle in the rainy season): unless treated quickly, it eats away the warm extremities. And then there is the odd exotic, like the fever which erupted in the state of Para in the 1960s, killing seventy-one people, including the research unit sent in to identify it.
The big animals are supposed to be much friendlier than you might imagine. The jaguar kills you with a bite to the head, but only in exceptional circumstances. Two vipers, the fer de lance (up to seven and a half feet long) and the bushmaster (up to twelve feet, the largest in the world), only kill you if you step on them. The anaconda is known to tighten its grip only when you breathe out; the electric eel can only deliver its 640 volts before its breakfast; the piranha only rips you to bits if you are already bleeding, and the Giant catfish merely has a penchant for taking your feet off at the ankle as you do the crawl.
The smaller animals are, on the whole, much more annoying – the mosquitoes, blackfly, tapir-fly, chiggers, ticks, scabies-producing Tunga penetrans and Dermatobia hominis, the human botfly, whose larvae bore into the skin, eat modest amounts of you for forty days, and emerge as inch-long maggots.
But it was the candiru, the toothpick-fish, a tiny catfish adapted for a parasitic life in the gills and cloaca of bigger fish, which swam most persistently into my dreams on troubled nights.
In Borneo, when staying in the longhouses, I learned that going down to the river in the early morning is the polite thing to do – you know you are swimming in the socially correct patch of muddy river when fish nuzzle your pants, wanting you to take them down and produce their breakfast. In the Amazon, on the other hand, should you have too much to drink, say, and inadvertently urinate as you swim, any homeless candiru, attracted by the smell, will take you for a big fish and swim excitedly up your stream of uric acid, enter your urethra like a worm into its burrow and, raising its gill-covers, stick out a set of retrorse spines. Nothing can be done. The pain, apparently, is spectacular. You must get to a hospital before your bladder bursts; you must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis.
In consultation with my friend at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, Donald Hopkins, the inventor of the haemorrhoid gun, I designed an anti-candiru device: we took a cricket-box, cut out the front panel, and replaced it with a tea-strainer.
Released so brilliantly from this particular fear, I began, in earnest, to panic. Alfred Russel Wallace’s resolution seemed the only one possible. Attacked by fever in his dugout on the Rio Negro in 1851, ‘I began taking doses of quinine,’ he tells us,
…
and drinking plentifully cream of tartar water, though I was so weak and apathetic that at times I could hardly muster resolution to move myself to prepare them. It is at such times that one feels the want of a friend … for of course it is impossible to get the Indians to do those little things without so much explanation and showing as would require more exertion than doing them oneself – during two days and nights I hardly cared if we sank or swam. While in that apathetic state I was constantly half-thinking, half-dreaming, of all my past life and future hopes, and that they were perhaps all doomed to end here on the Rio Negro. But with returning health those gloomy thoughts passed away, and I again went on, rejoicing in this my last voyage, and looking forward with firm hope to home, sweet home! I however made an inward vow never to travel again in such wild, unpeopled districts without some civilised companion or attendant.
That was the answer: I would persuade the civilised companion of my Borneo journey, the poet James Fenton, to visit the Venezuelan Amazons with me. He would be flattered to be asked. He would be delighted to come.
After supper at the long table in James’s kitchen (a map of Borneo still hung on the wall), halfway through a bottle of Glenmorangie, I judged the time was ripe.
‘James,’ I said, ‘you are looking ill. You are working far too hard writing all these reviews. You need a break. Why don’t you come to the Amazon with me?’
‘Are you listening seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I want you to know,’ said James, shutting his eyes and pressing his palms up over his face and the top of his bald head, ‘that I would not come with you to High Wycombe.’
‘I urgently desire never to see it again’
RUDYARD KIPLING
American Notes (1891)
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) lived in Vermont for four years following his marriage in 1892, but he had also visited the USA three years before as part of an extended journey back to England from India, where he was born. His visit to Chicago was part of the earlier journey during which he had also paid an unannounced, but well received, visit to Mark Twain in Elmira, New York.
I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the ‘boss’ town of America.
I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country. They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was ‘the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty’s earth.’ By the way, when an American wishes to indicate the next country or state, he says, ‘God A’mighty’s earth.’ This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.
Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a great horror.
Except in London – and I have forgotten what London was like – I had never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and no beauty – only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.
A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.
He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they were trying to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled with untold abominations, and bid me watch the stream of traffic across the bridges.
He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them there had no thought of beauty, and, therefore, he was a savage.
Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and studded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each vender stood at his door howling – ‘For the sake of my money, employ or buy of me, and me only!’
Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The other makes me ill.
And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress, and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress…
… Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all – a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic design.
To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not He, was the centre of attraction. With a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold, and all the plate-glass diamond), and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the Judgment, and ran: – ‘No! I tell you God doesn’t do business that way!’
‘we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them …’
MARK TWAIN
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Mark Twain (1835–1910) himself has crossed the Atlantic aboard the Quaker City with a group of American packet or package tourists in 1867. Twain was in part taking revenge on European writers, including Charles Dickens (American Notes for General Circulation, 1842), and Frances Trollope (Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832), who had dunned aspects of the newly self-confident USA in their own commentary. He loved to blur the line between parody and comment.
Here he is first in Paris and then Venice, which has been praised enough in Scraps, and can easily withstand a Mark Twain barb.
The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. One of our passengers said to a shopkeeper in reference to a proposed return to buy a pair of gloves, ‘Allong restay trankeel – may be ve coom Moonday;’ and, would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said …
The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them.
This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world’s applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies wellnigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded theses piers with the products of every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect, and melancholy decay. Six hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the greatest commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world. Today her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth, – a peddler of glass-beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children.
The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists. It seems a sort of sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and her desolation from our view. One ought, indeed, to turn away from her rags, her poverty and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was when she sank the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of Constantinople.
We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging to the Grand Hotel d’Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse than anything else, though to speak the card, it was a gondola. And this was the storied gondola of Venice!—the fairy boat in which the princely cavaliers of the olden times were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublets touched his guitar and sang as only gondoliers can sing! This the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier!—the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned a corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to the traditions of his race. I stood it a little while. Then I said:—
‘Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I’m a pilgrim, and I’m a stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such caterwauling as that. If that goes on, one of us has to take water. It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice had been blighted for ever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this system of destruction shall go no further; I will accept the hearse, under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but here I register a dark and bloody oath that you shan’t sing. Another yelp, and overboard you go.’
I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed for ever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry and romance stood revealed. Right from the water’s edge rose long lines of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys; ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves. There was life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to have an expression about them of having an eye out for such enterprises as these at the same moment. Music came floating over the waters – Venice was complete.
It was a beautiful picture – very soft and dreamy and beautiful. But what was this Venice to compare with the Venice of midnight? Nothing. There was a fête – a grand fête in honour of some saint who had been instrumental in checking the cholera three hundred years ago, and all of Venice was abroad on the water. It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not know how soon they might need the saint’s services again, now that the cholera was spreading everywhere. So in one vast space – say a third of a mile wide and two miles long-were collected two thousand gonzolas, and every one of them had from two to ten, twenty, and even thirty coloured lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants. Just as far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together – like a vast garden of many-coloured flowers, except that these blossoms were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy evolutions. Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the boats around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and pyramids and circles of coloured lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture; and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless, so many-coloured and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas so handsomely decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed, white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They had brought along the costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken curtains from the same place, I suppose. And they had also brought pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded around to stare and listen.
The fête was magnificent. They kept it up the whole night long, and I never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.
This the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier! – the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred from public scrutiny …
‘All visitors were monitored by a smouldering reptile in reception’
JOHN GIMLETTE
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels in Paraguay (1997)
Paraguay, ‘an island surrounded by land’, is not an obvious choice for travel literature, and John Gimlette (b. 1963), a London-based barrister when he is not travelling to write, does not have a lot of competition. He disliked and disapproved of so much of it as a young traveller, but is drawn back for more and more. The result is the book with this splendid name.
I stayed at the Hotel Guarani. It was not a great success. The hotel flunkies seemed if anything slightly less interested in my contentment now than they had been when I was an intruder. To get across the swimming pool, I now had to nose my way through a froth of flies. Sometimes, I got lost in the gloomy upper floors of the hotel and found myself in rooms that had been abandoned long ago and that were heaped with dirty plates and sheets and dusty scraps of food. Some years later, the hotel was abandoned altogether, and when I next saw it, it was wreathed in soot and was being slowly devoured by tropical succulents.
I paid a visit to my old hotel, the Hispania. The Mennonites had long gone. Appalled at the new liberal order, ‘Mexicans’ tried to avoid Asunción now, and besides, the new Korean owners of the pensión had painted it white, like an old bridesmaid, and decorated it with parrot feathers and a large photograph of the docks at Seoul. The Anabaptists had drifted elsewhere.
The rains came early. Hot, bright-red water foamed through the streets. An oil tanker crashed in the Plaza de Los Heroes and a guard was mounted over the wreckage, dressed – I thought – like the Afrika Korps.
I took a bus up to Carmelitas to see the house that General Rodriguez was living in. The bus conductress was wearing tights patterned with elongated tigers, leaping up into her knickers. The rain got hotter and more intense.
Rodríguez’s house was a worthy tourist attraction because it was the nearest thing that South America had to a Palace of Versailles. I stood in the long wet grass gaping up at the crenellations and turrets. It had a turquoise roof that had been flown in, tile by tile, from France. When someone once asked the old emir how he could enjoy such lavish bijoux on $500 a month, he’d wafted away their impertinence: ‘I gave up smoking.’
…
Apart from the half-dead gerontocrats, there were other, more occasional guests at The Gran Hotel. Twice a week there was a small técanasta party in the lobby. I suspected that the ladies were the delicate rump of what had been a larger card circle. They arrived with silvery perms and kidskin gloves and drank tea from china cups and saucers. They conversed in Spanish and played their cards in French, and when the games were over, they slipped their gloves back on and swarthy drivers took them home.
Things were more lively on the weekends. There were the tennisplayers, of course, and every Saturday, the ballroom was tinselled up for a ball. It was usually a fifteenth birthday party for a debutante. These weren’t like the office girls, but were winsome little slips – tutored in Miami, pastured in Uruguay and heeled in Buenos Aires. They had long cataracts of courtly Spanish names – Caballero, Ibarra, Yegros, Elizeche, Espinoza – which had often been hitched together as evidence of unimpeachable pedigree. They’d be photographed with their parents – bundles of startling tuxedos and organza – and then, as the whisky flowed, they’d all polka and sing in Guarani. It was now chic to be an Indian.
All visitors were monitored by a smouldering reptile in reception. Because her lair was faced – in the Teutonic style – with lumps of rock, she was often difficult to see in the gloom. However, whenever a stranger stepped into the lobby, she was quickly on the scent and her looseskinned neck craned out of its cave. This being Asunciόn, most people knew exactly who she was.
‘She’s a terrible snob,’ one friend told me.
‘Her father was a minister in the Stronato,’ said another.
‘She’s not there working for the salary, she just wants to know what’s going on and who everybody is.’
Meanwhile, she devoured their details, mentally weighing up their carats and boring into bank accounts, clambering into their family trees and sniffing their blood for its blueness. She was a sort of social pyragüé, mounted with crimson talons.
She called me ‘Monsieur D’Juim au Lait’, and I didn’t care to correct her.
‘Farmers started growing bungalows instead of wheat’
JOHN BETJEMAN
Shell Guide to Cornwall (introduction to the 1954 edition)
John Betjeman (1906–84) was the most popular and best known of all the Poets Laureate of the United Kingdom, partly because of the humour and easy accessibility of his poetry, and also because he became a familiar television personality. The Shell Guides were launched with Betjeman’s Cornwall in 1934 and over the next thirty years were to cover most of the British Isles, a new type of guide aimed at the new motorists. Betjeman and his good friend, the artist John Piper, cooperated on several of them.
The passage is also a tribute to one of the most charming of men. He was my sister’s friend and sometime employer and as a result it was my luck that he was my guide to Cornwall. I stayed with him and his friend ‘Feeble’ (Elizabeth Cavendish) at his house at St Enodoc. Even at his most critical he remained affectionate towards almost everyone. We meandered around the golf course together. He would wander off to show me something in the adjacent churchyard or field whilst other golfers waited indulgently behind for us to continue.
When I first came to Cornwall over fifty years ago, as a small boy, we drove the seven miles from the station in a horse-brake, and there was only one motor-car in the parish and this could not attempt the steeper hills. Roads were only partially metalled and in the lesser lanes the rock showed through on the surface. Everyone in the village had oil lamps and candles. A journey to the nearest town and back was a day’s expedition. There were still many country people who had never been to London and the story used to be told of one of them who thought the metropolis was all under a glass roof because he never got further than Paddington Station. Visitors to Cornwall, ‘foreigners’ as they are rightly called by the Cornish, were mostly fishermen, golfers and artists. My own father, in his leisure from business in London, was all three.
…
The awakening of the Cornish to the value of the tourist industry came with the railways. The Great Western extended itself into Cornwall and was thought of first in terms of goods traffic – tin, china clay and fish. The London and South-Western, the Great Western’s great rival, ran a line into north Cornwall via Okehampton, largely for holiday traffic. Fathers who had come for the fishing and mothers who wanted sea air for their families at cheaper rates and in less plebeian conditions than those provided in Thanet or Brighton came to Cornwall. Monster hotels were built at the beginning of this century to provide for them, such as the King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel, the Poldhu at Mullion and the Metropole at Padstow. Many a terrace of boarding houses arose in seaports which had hitherto thought that their only industry was to be fishing. Newquay and Bude are largely foreigners’ creations, and Falmouth, turning the corner westward of Pendennis Castle, built a new seaside town. Simultaneously with the big hotel came the early twentieth-century cult of the old cottage in the country, and picturesque ports like Polperro, St Ives and Looe and Fowey did well. Farmers’ wives specialised in Cornish teas and fishermen rowed the ‘foreigners’ out of the harbour to catch mackerel they would otherwise be catching themselves. Farmers on the sea coast started growing bungalows instead of wheat.
All this tourist industry brought prosperity and security to Cornwall until the appearance of the Duchy was seriously altered by electricity and the motor-car. The Electricity Board has strung the fields, villages and towns of Cornwall with more poles and wires, ill-sited and clumsily arranged, than in any other part of the British Isles. This is partly because even the remotest bungalow on a cliff wants electricity and partly because burying cables in slate or granite is expensive. The motor-car has made the greatest change of all. Roads have been widened, blocks of houses have been taken down in picturesque ports to make way for car parks; petrol stations proliferate; huge hoardings to attract the motorist line the entrances to towns. In the holiday season lorries and cars trailing caravans and boats block lanes never intended for such heavy traffic. The County Planning authorities, hard put to it to find available sites on the coast, have been obliged to introduce caravans and chalets even to the wooded inland valleys. Several stretches of the coast have been rescued by the National Trust or saved, at any rate for their lifetime, by those landowners who can still afford to hold out against the blandishment of ‘developers’. The old and beautiful Cornwall is now mostly to be found on foot or in a small car by those skilled in using the 1-inch ordnance survey map. It is partly in search of this Cornwall that this guide book has gone. There is also the consolation that no one yet has discovered how to build houses on the sea.