TRAVEL / Nothing to declare but their prejudice: Is the travel book you are reading written by a Self-Seeker or a Misery Guts? Itinerant authors invite categorisation, says Christopher West

TRAVEL writing has blossomed and flourished in the last 10 years: now, surely, it is time to trim this exuberant growth into neat, tendable 'schools'. These are my classifications.

First, there is the travel writer of the Ripping Wheeze school. Backwards Across The Pamirs On A Unicycle goes our intrepid hero/heroine. RW authors usually have a double-barrelled name; they always have an old school- chum who is now either a Second Secretary at the Embassy or married to one. 'Bonky' Fitzgibbon eases their path round local red tape, and invites RW travellers to the first decent meal they have had for 47 days, where they are captivated by Bonky's charming wife, Emma, or the flashing eyes of Khalid the embassy doorman . . .

Ripping Wheeze books aren't always very well written, but they have the real, underrated virtue of wholesomeness. Our author is fundamentally a good egg, and when he or she meets another good egg, even if neither can speak a word of the other's language, a bond of friendship is established. The old man who repairs Rupert Blenkinsop-Smythe's unicycle with gum made out of congealed yak's blood is a better person than the razor-sharp characters at Rupert's chambers; the young wife who tells Sophia Patterson-Boggs intimate details about life in the zenana is gentler and kinder than the debs with whom she shared a Chelsea flat. The RW traveller has a healthy nose for human niceness - and plenty of bottle. I'm genuinely pleased when they get to their destination: who needs literary genius, anyway?

Rupert and Sophia's fundamental bonhomie is not shared by my second category of traveller, the Misery Guts. Half-way down page one, I am already wondering why the MG bothered to come travelling at all. He (female MGs stick to fiction) hates the discomfort; he hates the locals; most of all, he hates his fellow travellers. If he has a redeeming feature, it is that he hates himself too: he does have some taste . . . The MG is a professional travel writer. He has done his research. And he does write well. The prose that wells up from his anguished soul is beautiful and evocative - but this only makes Misery-Guts's travelogues more depressing. If this fellow is so capable of knowing and feeling beauty, why can't he cheer himself up? Instead, the 'high' never lasts - something or somebody soon upsets the MG's delicate inner ecology, and we're back to self-pity, bile (or whatever peripatetic gloom he specialises in spreading). Next come the Wandering Pedants. These people have done lots and lots of research beforehand, and even more after getting back. Their books are stuffed with it: obscure battles, rulers with unpronounceable names, anecdotes 'unearthed' in university libraries or lifted from the rare, leather-bound edition of Sir Horace Plugg's 1831 Travels that they lugged across Transylvania (the ordinary traveller takes jolly Australian guide-books, Jackie Collins or slim volumes about Zen). The WP sits down on a pile of rubble and thinks how amazing it is that 857 years ago King Almeric the Cruel signed the Treaty of Glug with Sultan Inzaman-ul-haq - here in this very place. (Well, possibly, anyway; there's a fascinating debate in Simpkins's Eclectica about whether the treaty was actually signed here or in the neighbouring city of Vlov . . .) I find WP books hard to read because the perpetual history lessons destroy any pace in the narrative.

A cousin of the Wandering Pedant is the Self-Seeker. Either you regard S-S books as riveting inner dramas, or they drive you up the wall. I enjoy them: the best Seekers like the places they go to, and make an effort to form real friendships with the people they meet there. In bad S-S travelogues, however, we never get to see the destination, let alone meet any locals. We read extracts from its philosophers, we sit at the feet of its gurus and realise with a blinding flash what Lao Tzu meant when he said: 'Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.' In the worst ones, we get a long lecture on how wicked we all are in the West - not just the bad old imperialists, but all of us who do things such as work, make love, watch TV and fritter our money on beer, clothes and travel books. Of course, the original model for the modern Self-Seeker hit the road for India back in the Sixties. Some of these veterans are still commuting annually from Goa to Manali, though many more are now commuting daily from Surbiton to Waterloo - and a few make their way into print.

A particular dislike of mine is the Funny Foreigner school of travel writers. For these people - almost all ex-Oxbridge - the Third World is peopled by eccentrics. FF books ring with bizarre phonetic dialogue: 'Ingliz and Outer Mongolia good friend, yah?' I don't know how FF travellers manage to spend six-month journeys entirely in the company of senile old men, sex-mad taxi-drivers and adolescent pop-junkies - but they do. My own backpacking encounters, largely with pleasant, competent, workaday people with concerns (family, money etc) similar to my own, were frightfully dull by FF standards. And they stopped me from enjoying that smug, sniggering superiority that underlies the FF approach to travel.

Ranged against the Funny Foreigner brigade is a new breed of Politically Correct travellers. First stop is the local gay bar, even if they are - poor things - heterosexual. Naturally, PC writers adopt the highest possible moral tone - which doesn't stop them being patronising and abusive to anyone who doesn't fit their preconceptions. 'Yoof' travel guides and TV programmes are particularly good at this, clucking superciliously over the 'materialism' of the rickshaw-man who took them to the Che Guevara Basket-Weaving Commune and had the temerity to ask for a tip. Good travel writers are far too slow tocriticise other cultures and individuals to be Politically Correct.

No list of travel genres would be complete without the Mtumbi-or-jungle traveller. Old colonials excelled in this - but a few youngsters can still be found sitting pensively on their obambo, drinking a refreshing cup of nbe while listening to the lonesome cry of the mpopo somewhere out there in the vast, timeless ngwana. The Mtumbi-or-jungle traveller often makes up for a surfeit of exotic vocabulary with a stunning parochialism. The British diplomat Lord Macartney was the first Westerner ever to set foot inside the Qing dynasty Summer Palace at Jehol. His principal comment was that it reminded him of the ornamental gardens at Stowe.

In truth, there are only two fundamental categories of travel writers - good and bad. The bad ones fail in various ways (see above); the good ones are united in their love of travel and their capacity to share it with us. They open our minds to how people think and feel in different parts of our planet; they make us bigger, richer, happier. Long may they continue to blossom and flourish.

Christopher West's own travel book, which of course combines all the virtues outlined above with none of the defects, is called 'Journey To The Middle Kingdom', and is published by Simon and Schuster at pounds 14.99

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