My friend and fellow travel writer Sophia Dembling responded to my birthday wishes to Jonathan Raban and Colin Thubron with a little story about the time she did a phone interview with Raban.

She found him "surly and intimidating," and he chewed her out for calling him a "travel writer."

I met Raban in Seattle in the mid-90s and also found him unpleasant and imperious. Wrtiers sometimes are but, in my experience, travel writers aren't.

Jan Morris has made "kindness" something of a theme, not just in her work but in her life. The first time I met her, at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1991, she apologized for keeping me waiting for our interview. I had waited for about five minutes, watching her graciously talk to admirers and sign her books.

Pico Iyer is another travel writer who is keenly aware of the feelings of others, as befits a man whose most recent book is about the Dalai Lama.

Colin Thubron, when I interviewed him in Philadelphia a number of years ago, was modest and gracious, a true English gentleman. Even Paul Theroux, so often thought of as snide and condescending, was, during our meeting, friendly and open, one of the few people I've ever interviewed who actually asked me questions.

Raban, for some reason, stands out from the crowd. But then, he doesn't want to be thought of as a travel writer anyway.

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In a nice literary coincidence, two of the greatest living travel writers were born on the same day - June 14: Raban in 1942 and Thubron in 1939. (I'm celebrating today because tomorrow I'm off.)

Raban's field of specialty is the United States. In Old Glory he took a boat down the Mississippi - from Minneapolis to New Orleans - and captured the essence not only of the river but also the Midwest. Unlike a lot of British observers, he took America seriously. In his next book, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, he moved about the country - Manhattan, Alabama, Key West, Seattle (which he eventually made his home) - and depicted the immigrant experience. Like Paul Theroux, he gave the travel book something of the shape of a novel, but he brought to it much more depth and insight. Unfortunately for lovers of travel, he now focuses on fiction.

Thubron has cut a wider swath, with books on western Russia, Siberia, China, central Asia and, most recently, the Silk Road. He is among the most dedicated of travel writers - learning both Russian and Mandarin - as well as the most rugged. He brings Raban's fierce intelligence to his work but complements it with a generous heart, so that he is able not only to interpret the landscape but connect with the people. Pick up Among the Russians or Behind the Wall or Shadow of the Silk Road and you will see what great travel writing is. And be thankful for June 14th.

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Born in Istanbul on June 7, 1952. (A diverse group of people share this birthday - Nikki Giovanni, Anna Kournikova, Prince, me - though of this quintet only Pamuk and I were born in the same year.)

Primarily a novelist, the Nobel Prize winner is also the author of Istanbul: Memories and the City, a beautiful memoir and an evocative hymn to, and lament for, his hometown. "For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy," he writes. "I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Instanbullus) making it my own."

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I've always claimed that it's not just the foreign lands but the travel writers that make my job interesting. (Even now, when my contacts with both have been reduced.)

Working on a column about street food, I e-mailed Alan Behr - my trusty German hand - about currywurst and its relationship to Berlin. This is what I got back:

Currywust: quite a Berlin thing, in the main. You get it everywhere else, but it's the signature sausage of Berlin. The best stand for it about which I'm aware--and darn, I didn't check it out this time--is one painted in the international gay colors, on the Wittenberglatz, in Berlin. (Assuming it's still there.)

I couldn't see Annette this time because, 2 days before our scheduled dinner, her father suddenly returned to Berlin, after 4 yrs in Sri Lanka as a Buddhist monk.

While I was in Berlin, the Philharmonic burned 4 days after I saw a concert there, and the Dalai Lama and I were so close to each other at the Adlon Hotel, I think at one point we shared a bath.

Berlin's eastern part has now absolutely exceeded the old West Berlin as the place to visit. In fact, in over a week, I only spent a brief bit of time in the former West Berlin.

In the old days, I'd send an article to you about it. I feel like I'm that East German writer in The Lives of Others, silenced by the state police.

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People in Broward who never go to Miami miss out on one of South Florida's great experiences - sitting in the courtyard of Books & Books on a balmy evening.

My wife and I did this Friday, at the Coral Gables store, with the poet Michael Hettich and his wife Colleen, the owner Mitchell Kaplan and the travel writer Tony Horwitz, who had just spoken inside about his most recent book, A Voyage Long and Strange, about the early explorers to this continent.

During his talk, Horwitz expressed puzzlement, mixed with dismay, that American history as it is taught in schools tends to begin in 1620 with the pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, when there were numerous explorers and settlements before them. He suggested that if these other stories - involving the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, etc. - were better known, we would have an easier time today dealing with multiculturalism. Because we would see that it is nothing new; it's been our condition from the start.

He also mentioned how often the various groups reverted to national stereotypes. While the English were starving in Jamestown, he said, the French were finding berries and other wonderful things to eat in cold Canada. They started a gastronomic society. They remarked in their journals on the attractiveness of the local women.

In the courtyard, the conversation flowed from travel to children to politics to journalism. A former foreign correspondent, Horwitz talked about arriving in a foreign country with very little knowledge of the place and having to find his way. He contrasted this with British correspondents, who tend to be old hands, fluent in the language, versed in the culture, seeped in the history. And then, after American correspondents spend a few years in a country, and begin to understand it, they are moved to another, where they have to start from scratch. A practice, when you think about it, strange and counterproductive.

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The novelist and nature writer turns 81 today. Born in New York City, Matthiessen became one of the founders of The Paris Review. His novels, a number of which, including Killing Mister Watson, are set in the Everglades, often explore the complex relationship between man and nature. His nonfiction book The Snow Leopard is considered one of the great travel books of the 20th century

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Born on this day in 1895 in Red Bank, NJ.

There was a time when travel books were so respectable even our greatest literary critic wrote them.

Wilson was interested in virtually everything (except, strangely, the Spanish-speaking world), so it was only natural that he wrote travel books. His most famous, Europe Without Baedeker (Baedeker being the Frommer of its day), is a characteristically detailed description of the post-war cultural and political landscape of England, Italy and Greece.

In Red, Black, Blond and Olive he visits New Mexico (focusing on the Zuni), Haiti, Soviet Russia and Israel. (What did I say about wide-ranging?). On his way to Haiti he stops in Miami:

"I have never been here before and am astounded and appalled by this place. ... Miami Beach goes on for miles, with its monotonous lines of palms, its thousands of hotels and houses which seem to have imposed on them ... a blanched and insipid uniformity. ...What draws people to this vacuum?"

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"They should have put out more chairs," Rosemary Jones said at the funeral home, which, by 6 pm yesterday, was standing room only. A fitting tribute to a passionate historian, a fine writer and a true Southern gentleman.

Stuart, and his widow Joan, sometimes graced the pages of my Travel section, writing not just about Florida but about long car trips, their minds as open as the road.

Addressing the large crowd of friends and family, Joan told of their drive to Jupiter, Florida, after they had decided to move from Maryland. It was getting late, the kids were tired and cranky, and Stuart, sitting at the wheel, asked, "Do you want to take the scenic route?"

"He took," she said smiling, "the scenic route in life's journey."

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I wasn't going to comment on - and thus give more publicity to - the guidebook writer who wrote a tell-all book about the business of guidebook writing and then gave an interview flaunting his bad boy antics followed by a damage-control interview downplaying his misdeeds in what was an impressive effort - sort of like an attempted double play off a slow grounder - to keep both readers AND reputation.

But he got me thinking about the proverbial iceberg tip, and wondering if eventually we're going to hear that:

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, is still happily married to her first husband.

Rory Stewart walked across Andorra, and just pretended it was Afghanistan.

Paul Theroux has never actually met V.S. Naipaul.

In her heart of hearts, Patricia Schultz thinks there are only 34 places you ought to see before you die.

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Born on this day in London in 1815.

The prolific novelist also wrote travel books, one of which inspired Paul Theroux to write one of the wisest things I've ever read about the genre.

In an essay in Granta magazine in 1989, Theroux quoted a passage from Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main and at the end of it wrote: "Something human had happened, and Trollope recorded it: that, it seemed to me, was the essence of good travel writing."

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Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on this day in 1899.

Lolita, the book that made him famous, is the account of a road trip (among other things) in which the commonplaces of American life are exquisitely rendered through a European (Nabokovian) sensibility.

"We passed and repassed," begins a paragraph on page 157, "through the whole gamut of American roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head ... impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of celestial sundaes..."

In 1969, in preparation for the greatest journey of the 20th century, Esquire magazine asked famous writers what they would like the first man on the moon to say. Nabokov responded: "I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack."


photo: Library of Congress

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World Hum - that invaluable online magazine of travel news and travel writing - alerted me to a recent review by Paul Theroux of a new biography of V.S. Naipaul.

The two men are closely linked, not only because they are about the last in a long line of novelists who also write travel books, but because of their literary friendship gone bad.

Theroux chronicled it in his book Sir Vidia's Shadow, starting with their meeting in Africa - when the older Naipaul took the young writer under his wing - and ending with Naipaul's abrupt and unexplained break with his prolific and successful disciple.

In the review, which appeared in the London Times, Theroux lists instances of Naipaul's cruelty and selfishness with great gusto, almost glee, as if to say: "See, it's not just me! He really is despicable." You get the feeling that, because of this new biography, he feels vindicated for writing his memoir.

But the review raises the question (in a way that the memoir didn't): If Naipaul really is such a horrible man - which I don't doubt he is - why was Theroux his friend for so long?

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