I picked up this one for inspiration. I’d read that it was the book to read if you want to know how to write a travelogue. I can see why.

Check this paragraph:

The Galician night came quickly, the hills turned purple and the valleys flooded with heavy shadow. The jagged coastline below, now dark and glittering, looked like sweepings of broken glass. Vigo was cold and dim, an unlighted ruin, already smothered in the dead blue dusk. Only the sky and the ocean stayed alive, running with immense streams of flame. Then as the sun went down it seemed to drag the whole sky with it like the shreds of a burning curtain, leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering along the estuaries and around the many islands. I saw the small white ship, my last link with home, flare like a taper and die away in the darkness; then I was alone at last, sitting on a hilltop, my teeth chattering as the night wind rose.

I would be delighted to write something as descriptive as that while sitting on the hillside as the sun went down, but this book was written in 1969, 35 years after the journey took place. That’s quite an impressive memory.

The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One’s blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed to be the only way to agitate the air around me. I began to forget what I was doing on the road at all; I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes.

The story, such as it is, isn’t a racer, but the descriptions paint a more vivid picture than any album stuffed full of photos. The skill in the writing is the way in which Lee manages to get away with drenching his prose in quite so many similes and metaphors without weighing it down or leaving it feeling overworked.

A great piece of armchair travel, it chronicles Lee’s two year journey through a largely unexplored country. Malaga, Marbella and Fuengirola are small fishing ports, not high-rise resorts, and as the story runs on we start to hear the first rumblings of war: civil war. It’s this momentous evolution that ultimately gives the story its satisfying pay-off, and runs it perfectly into George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.