Polar bears, George Best ...and the day Sara thought her knickers were on fire

Sara Wheeler’s memoir of her life as a travel writer is intrepid and sparky, full of canny quips and lightly poetic observations. It isn’t, however, the book she’d intended to write next. That was to have been an exploration of the Bronx, New York City’s borough, whose 1.4million inhabitants speak between them 160 languages.

Covid paused her research a few months in, but it was woke-ism that cancelled the project. As a white Englishwoman, Wheeler suddenly found herself no longer deemed a valid chronicler of the Bronx experience.

It’s just one of the ways that travel writing has evolved in the decades since she started out. One constant has been the misogyny she’s faced on the road – that hasn’t changed, she observes, although turning 60 seems to have bestowed upon her a kind of invisibility cloak.

She chooses to see this latest development as a liberation, and throughout her entertaining and thoughtful voyage through notebooks amassed over decades, any wistfulness is amply balanced by a sense of freedom, her wonderment undimmed even if it’s tempered by experience.

Growing up in working-class Bristol in the 1960s and 1970s, Wheeler wasn’t much encouraged to think of the world beyond. That insularity – still more so after a thoroughly unlikely package tour to Moscow with her parents aged ten (a cameo from George Best compounds the delightful improbability) – made her determined to escape.

And so she got to sleep on Captain Scott’s bunk in the Antarctic and recline in Francis Ford Coppola’s hammock in Belize, to board 17-hour trains in India, their compartments scented by vases of roses and gladioli, and be initiated into a Swahili massage ritual that made her think her knickers had caught fire. She didn’t let motherhood stop her, either. To this day she never packs a hairbrush but, with bills to pay, she frequently took her children along even as babies.

Was she ever afraid as a woman travelling alone, pursuing a notoriously testosterone-fuelled vocation? Just once, she admits, while being circled by a polar bear. Otherwise she’s more fearful in the John Lewis curtain department.