Louisa Herd: Fun in the sun? You've got to be joking, mate

David Hill's lucid take on tourism certainly struck a chord with this reader. Coming from Scotland, where the mass production of tat has been raised to an art-form (Loch Ness Monster tea towels, miniature bagpiper cigarette lighters and lurid toorie bunnets in McGhastlie tartan that normally grace the sozzled heads of melancholy football fans), I have to agree that the tourism dollar is a mighty shaky one to base your national economy on.

But, more so, Mr Hill's article begged the perennial question: why do folk travel for fun in the first place?

I hate travelling. I cannot stand driving into Wellsford, for heaven's sake, let alone jetting off to Phuket, Paris, Peru or anywhere else that the beautiful people are congregating this season.

My dislike of the pastime is not due to my flying phobia, though that's bad enough, nor is it because of any fears of loony viruses or mutating terrorists.

It's just that 99 per cent of those whose wobbly camcorder commentaries I've sat through don't actually seem to have had all that wonderful a time.

Wish you were here? Doubt it, brother.

They get ripped off by cunning Singaporean Rolex vendors whose cousin churns them out at 10c a gross in a back shop off Orchard Rd, they have a pocket or two picked in London, and their hotel rooms are turned over in Turkey.

Oh, the kebabs and the succulent vine leaf-wrapped meatballs and the bot that laid Ethel up in a hospital where the cockroaches put on white coats and were deferred to as senior consultants ... that Tunisian waiter who took in our Sharon something awful and him married all the time, with six kids ... young Stu breaking his arm on that Eyetie bungy jump, and our Terry getting bitten by a poisonous thing in Florida that needed three doctors at 10 grand apiece and he's still got that funny walk ...

Our intrepid travellers are corralled into cattle pens of airports, loaded on to flying sardine tins and hurtled through the air for 12 hours at a stretch, then finally decanted into a luxury beach resort.

It's at this point they discover that the hotel staff have done a bunk en masse to a big soccer match, there's a spider the size of a yorkshire terrier in the shower and what, please milady, is this loo paper of which you speak?

The tide has gone out, the pedalos don't work and the bloke who is meant to service the swimming pools had a barney with the manager and is doing a lag, with every prospect of having a limb chopped off for insubordination.

One can only handle so many ancient monuments. Let's be honest, how much of that trip to Angkor Wat did you actually take in?

Were you really paying much attention to the guide's rhapsodies over this stunning Cambodian temple complex, or were you thinking more about sitting in an ice-filled bath with a cold beer in your hand and wondering why tropical insects were so huge?

And was that tickling sensation a giant Cambodian temple wasp crawling down your neck?

Awkward question in hot climates: to swat or not to swat, and when the swattee has a stinger on it like a large-bore hypodermic, it can be a hard call to make.

What about the souvenir problem? We have a sombrero for Auntie Dot, and that nice china donkey for Mrs Thomson. And Joe can have that poncho that's too small for Billy, and we've picked up a lovely mantilla in Seville for Tracey.

It's not until you are about to touch down on home soil that you remember you promised to bring back one of those squirty glass wine wotsits for the woman next door who was feeding your cat. Dang.

Like the loaves and fishes, it would take a miracle to share three bottles of Spanish plonk and a carton of duty-free fags among five people and not offend one of them.

Try it - it causes more family feuds than a rich uncle's will.

Travel broadens the mind, they say. I have been to only two countries and while some may feel that the lack of a bare-bottomed bus orgy across Europe in my youth has left a rent in the fabric of my worldly experiences, I cannot agree.

I detest travelling, but am indebted to travel writers.

Thanks to their rich prose, the delights of Zanzibar, the scenic thrill of the Grand Canyon or the grandeur of the Alhambra can be mine without have to endure the dramas of passports, painful jabs or packing.

It is a wondrous beneficence of modern life that I can take up the Herald's travel section once a week and be in the Hermitage Museum 10 seconds later, gazing at the treasures of the tsars with no need to negotiate Aeroflot cardboard planes, peripatetic Siberian bear salesmen or Russian Mafiosi trying to corner the St Petersburg chewing-gum market.

Best of all, as a seasoned armchair traveller, a nice cup of tea is only two minutes away and no one is expecting any blimmin' souvenirs from me.

* Louisa Herd is a Wellsford writer.