Gazing at the racks, my fingers are drawn to this, the glossiest of glossies. I’d often seen it wink at me from the shelves but never before succumbed and carried it all the way to the till. With its rollcall of tempting destinations and sensuous cinnamon cover shot, it has to be Wanderlust. The other titles, Condé Nast Traveler, and National Geographic Traveller make me shiver: covers as dazzling as laundry detergent ads, blue-bright snow, ski headlines. It’s November, resorts are cloaked in the fluffy stuff, but perhaps I unmask myself too readily as a non-skier to ask, what more can we possibly say about skiing trips?
Back to that cover shot: scooping canyon wall, sunlit to moody perfection, garnet striations picking out rock contours like humbug sweets, this trails a story on 52 USA Travel Secrets. Somehow, I’ve never been drawn to US travel but some among this 52, Honolulu’s royal palace and the charms of Iowa’s UNESCO literary city (Iowa City) could provoke a rethink. At the foot of that artful cover, more intriguing locations are noted: West Greenland! Hawai’i! Gertrude Bell’s Turkey! And, Northern Greece, which I’ve been hankering for since falling for Thessaloniki and Meteora. Even Wanderlust’s forward-leaning, brush-stroked title font echoes travellers tilting into the ozone-rich wide blue yonder, bursting with curiosity and longing to discover the world. So far, it’s,engines primed, let’s roll down the runway for take-off
Inside the magazine, however, it’s a little more, Houston we have a problem. Like a bad first date, seductive first impressions give way to pallid, lukewarm content, cooling ardour and a sense of rueing the bill. Pious, brittle writing, (‘I left (Hawai’i) with a renewed sense of stewardship and respect for Mother Nature myself.’) spangled with clichés, is liberally cushioned with pages-long Promoted Content pieces that explain Wanderlust’s bulk(and perhaps why it’s still in business).Many of the Travelogue features propagate climate anxiety, in case one didn’t already worry enough. The 17ºC sunshine during a tour of Greenland’s Eqi glacier (its frequent calving events draw people to boat tours) provokes anguish, ‘The loud beauty … tinged with a sense of urgency, a realisation that this incredible landscape …may not remain for future generations. I left with plenty to ponder. ’Eqi’s rapid retreat is due to warmer air, ‘“Our glaciers were expected to eventually disappear,” a guide explains, “just not so fast.”’. Throughout the magazine, writers frequently home in on interviewees who dislike tourists or want only ‘quality tourists’ (i.e., wealthy ones) and even these visitors are viewed with wariness. People who say, ‘our airlines/airports need volume’, yet in the next line lament the increasing influx of visitors and their awful ways.
I was already primed to be charmed by Greenland, it wouldn’t have taken much to push me over the line into full infatuation. (I can’t explain this fascination, since I grew up permanently goose-bumped in chilly Scotland and, mostly, like to escape to the sun.) But by the end of the article, I’m filing it under ‘maybe not’ destinations. An awkward, passive first-person voice keeps the reader at arm’s-length, ‘I had chosen to explore the … island slowly, and without the ease of an expedition cruise, making travel between destinations a lot more challenging.’ goes one numbing paragraph opener in an anaemic portrait of what I imagine must be a visceral and intensely affecting journey. The writer gives us too much operational exposition and skimps on the memorable stuff. I wanted more poetry, less itinerary.
Despite the exotic raw material, there’s no nourishing detail. A stop in Aasiaat to see ‘historic houses’, the library and cultural centre, ‘a local highlight’, leaves me craving information, colour, or texture. Are these historic houses like the ones I know in Edinburgh, or wildly different- and in what sense are they historic? Which writers’ works might I find in the library and what’s in the cultural centre?Will it move me, leave its mark on me? I’m not given even a hint.
Food, a subject we may imagine gives many would-be visitors a moment’s pause,is not covered, save for a reference to a clichéd kind of initiation rite at a baptism. The writer, invited to sample a ‘menu’ (his italics) of dried whale and putrid-smelling seal blubber, is observed by locals expecting a flinch. What I know of Greenlandic cuisine is nothing – really, zero calories – except for the seal-blubber bit, and I expect manyreaders’ awarenessis at the same level. And, given what we know of the climate there suggests vegetable growing is not easy, surely describing the fare on offer and whether it’s riotously expensive would be a priority.If the writer is journeying expenses paid courtesy of a tourism board and/or tour operator, quotidian things like food costs may not register. But readers like me on a finite budget need to know about details like these. I think we should be told.
A fortnight later, another travel writer, who is also a part-time resident of Greenland, files his report from Nuuk in the Sunday Times: excited locals sitting on their roofs for the best view of the first incoming flight, welcoming visitors and planning their own adventures from the new airport. He describes the lighting of Nuuk’s Christmas tree, street revellers enjoying a huge firework display and a Greenlandic tapas cafe serving lumpfish roe and cod jerky. I learn the bright paint colours used on buildings are from a tradition whereby colour signalled function -red walled constructions were churches or cathedrals, schools and shops, yellowfor hospitals and health posts, blue meant fish processing and green for power, post and communications. This is the kind of insight I’d been yearning for all through my Wanderlust reading (the magazine’s article mentions the colour-function link but offers no detail).
Back in the Wanderlust pages, I move on from Greenland. The bromides come thick and fast, mountains invariably blanketed, sometimes by forests which in turn are reliably verdant, beaches sun-drenched, seas sparkling and roads are for the most part,winding. Astoundingly, all of these appear in the first two paragraphs of the Greek Zagori, story. It’s as if Dervla Murphy, Ben Okri and Gertrude Bell never happened. We know print journalism is on borrowed time and freelance travel writers often face a tough, uncertain gig. But it’s hard to escape the sense that wilting, formulaic prose like this offers little hope of arevival.
The full-page photo collages are set out with captions all in a band at the bottom making it hard to understand each image. There’s a strangely neutered style with many images prioritising pretty colours over pungency or intimacy. Most articles emphasise carbon offset calculations – an unsatisfactory way to deal with emissions and impact(a more effective option might be to give to a reforestation project such as acclaimed photographer Sebastiao Salgado’s Instituto Terra (Earth Institute) reforestation programme https://www.institutoterrastore.com/ ). The chastising style is seen in other incarnations too – including a piece with six tips on how not to offend the locals with your crass ways in Hawai’i. To espouse a certain ethical line is to invite scrutiny. And so, next to all the emphasis on concerns that touristic development in Greenland and Hawai’i must respect the environment and local people’s needs, it seems inconsistent that a review of a remote new luxury hotel (from £560pn) in the Qatari desert finds no room to mention possible impacts on delicate desert ecosystems or local customs and culture. Comment is also entirely absent onpotential barriers to travel in this region for minority groupsor well-documentedlabour conditions for construction workers.
My £7.95 is not entirely wasted: photos can be lush and sensuous, sometimes vivid. The features take in a mouth-watering trail of off-beat places – there are immersive stories on Ireland’s Blasket Islands and Wild Atlantic Way and wildlife spotting in The Gambia as well as a tempting round-up of the best new rail routes to try in 2025.
A half-page books feature in association with Stanfords highlights travel writing from the 1920s to date rather than new releases, giving us two sentence puff quotes rather than reviews. Jerry Brotton’s Four Points of the Compass,on the history of direction sounds intriguing. But the copious promotional features often outshine the frequently insipid column-inches of the house writers. The cover’s promise, all hype and glamour, was perhaps too much to live up to.
The escapist joy,the glee and wonder of travel and its power to recharge and remake us are remarkable by their absence here. Time and again, writers rehearse the same themes and preoccupations that we read about in the press at home. The jaded view of tourists is coupled with a reverence, without any mention of detail, for ‘traditional’ ways, remedies and culture, albeit only for selected cultures. It’s a distorted lens through which to view the incredible, the mysterious and moving byways and nooks of our planet and the people who inhabit them – and one that leaves no room for having our perspectives changed.
In summary, Wanderlust is a curious beast: a travel magazine with a horror of travellers that’s heavily funded by big tour companies, tourist boards, expensive hotels and well-off travellers.A match made in heaven it’s clearly not; perhaps instead it’s a marriage of convenience,staying together for the sake of the quids.
