Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel”, first published in 1956, just gets more and more prescient. “There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams/hurry too rapidly down to the sea,/and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops/makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion . . .” she writes, perfectly ventriloquising an exhausted and whining traveller, spoiled by seeing too many wonderful things.
“There are too many waterfalls here” is the kind of po-faced line I expect to find on TripAdvisor. Since I discovered a comment on the site that described a Cuban garden where guests ate breakfast as unhygienic, on account of the disgusting birds, I have a morbid fascination with the things people will find to complain about. My husband and I spent our holiday exploring Puglia and Basilicata in southern Italy. I had heard enticing rumours of beaches with the feel of St Tropez or Capri in the Fifties and Sixties, before sleepy fishing villages became the most sought-after holiday places in Europe, with outposts of Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana, the Mediterranean churned up with superyachts and lunch fraught with the risk of running into Philip Green. (“There are too many boats here,” as Bishop might have observed, “too many tycoons . . .”)
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