There has been a debate going on in the London media recently about the difference between male and female travel writers. It's not necessary, says one side, to machete your way fearlessly through the jungle, bare-chested and pursued by an unfriendly tribe of locals armed with deadly spiders in order to find the material to produce good travel writing. That's the old-fashioned, adrenaline-fuelled male approach, they say, best left to cuddlies like Thesiger and Redmond O'Hanlon. Anne Mustoe might agree. "You don't have to be male, 20, and an ace mechanic to set out on a great journey," she writes in Lone Traveller. She should know: now in her 60s, she has been twice round the world on her bike in the last 10 years, is still travelling, and has yet to learn how to mend a puncture.
But don't be misled by this: Mustoe has other attributes which see her through; meticulous planning of her itinerary, strict discipline when it comes to packing her two panniers and a droll take on life, are three. The first trip, west to east, was done in stages and took five years to complete. The second one, east to west, took 15 months. Tucked in with the long johns and the balaclava went a silk suit from Liberty's for special occasions and a bar of Roger and Gallet soap as a luxury. Horace goes with her everywhere as well - that's the poet Horace, for she is a classics graduate from Cambridge and was headmistress of a girls' school in Suffolk before taking to the road. There's also the shade of a dead husband in there somewhere, though this is only touched on: "I never mention that I am a widow in case it gives the wrong impression." The cycling was at times gruelling. Crossing from China into Pakistan, through the Khunjerab Pass - at 4733 metres the highest tarmac road in the world - it took her seven hours to cover fourteen kilometres. She cycled the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, from Xi'an to Turfan, and then whizzed down the Karakoram Highway to Gilgit via Kashgar. In South America, she put her bike on a local boat and spent a month sailing up the Amazon. In Australia (Sydney to Darwin in two months) she covered distances of up to 140 kilometres a day and once or twice had to sleep in her tent. This was something Mustoe loathed, for the comfort of a cockroach-free hotel, a good meal and a bath were things she cherished: backpackers' hostels were a last resort.
She tried both marijuana and opium when they were on offer but preferred her own crutches - "whiskey and a full-bodied red wine". Happily unburdened by guilt related to Third World poverty, child labour or the effects of colonialism, she has a common-sense response to all three when she encounters them. "The little sweeper boy was already on his knees, washing the entrance hall. He said, `Good morning, sir', and gave me the sweetest smile. Then he helped me down the steps with my bicycle . . . but when I offered him a five-rupee tip he rejected it with indignation. If anyone needed a tip it was that ragged little eight-year-old cleaner but I couldn't persuade him to take it. In the end, he settled for three ginger biscuits." Importunate men are dealt with briskly. (No problems in China. They think Europeans smell bad and have big noses so the last thing they want to do is molest one.) Women are treated kindly, border officials with the necessary amount of apparent respect. We are, after all, dealing here not with girlish jolly hockey sticks but with a woman of substance: she sold her Alpha Romeo and dispensed with her Hardy Amies wardrobe and her Italian shoes when she became a roadie.
"Do you think that it's because you're matoor that you're so unafraid?" she was once asked by an American in Beijing. "Probably," she replied. "Maturity is a help." I have no choice but to raise my glass of champagne to that.
Mary Russell's account of her travels in Bosnia appears in the Penguin collection of new travel writing by women, Amazonian, published recently
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