THERE was an apocryphal Englishman in the 1920s who carried a suitcase full of jam sandwiches with him to Italy, so he wouldn't have to eat the local food. There was the Maharajah of Jaipur, who brought huge silver urns of water from the Ganges when he travelled to visit Queen Victoria, so he wouldn't have to pollute his body with English water.

And there was my brother-in-law, who brought a roast turkey from London to the north of France, so he wouldn't have to eat in French restaurants. In the process, he got me started writing this book.

This is not to suggest that my brother in law is an uncivilised man. He is a perfectly respectable person to travel with. He likes Italian food, for example. He is a theatre designer, which gives him an eye for detail that illuminates many a shared sighting.

His passion for scuba diving brought the extended family to Egypt and put me near the mountain where Moses allegedly received the ten commandments. But like all of us, my brother in law brings his eccentricities with him when he travels. His particular peculiarity is a hatred of French cooking.

Now he might say that I am a peculiar person to travel with, because of my obsession with eating. He would find it odd that a day's activities may have to be built around finding the bistro where Van Gogh ate, or the shop that sells a cheese made from the milk of the sheep we passed in the nearby mountains, rather than, say, finding an art gallery or a historic church.

I can rationalise my eccentricity by asserting that travellers learn about a place by exploring the local food, even if it's disgusting. He can rationalise his eccentricity by saying that French food is too heavy and rich. While I take two hours over lunch, he would rather fuel himself with turkey sandwiches and use his time to observe other aspects of French life. My brother-in-law's attitude turned my visit to northern France into a project.

Chapter seven of this book discusses how I set about subverting his eccentricity, and how he and I concluded our journeys as changed men. That trip started me thinking about how strongly our experience of a place is coloured by forces that have nothing to do with the way the place actually is.

First, there are your fellow travellers. You're a different person when you travel with a child from the person you are when you travel with a lover, and different again when you travel alone. And so the countries you pass through are different each time. The lens through which we see any country is also distorted by the mode of transport we use, the guidebook we carry, our accommodation, the weather, the way we eat, and the psychological baggage we bring with us — our hopes, fears, prejudices, and strategies.

It seemed to me an interesting book might emerge from using my own experience to work out which combination of these factors could bring us closest to The Perfect Journey.

Drawing on four decades of travel in 15 countries, first with parents, then alone, then with friends or lovers, then with children, I have ended up with a reflection on what compels us to keep moving. The title may suggest a self-help text, but if you're seeking practical advice on where to get cheap airfares or how to pack a bag or what to tip a bellboy, you may be disappointed.

And if you want guidance on particular destinations, you'll find the book isn't divided up that way. There are four case studies covering Egypt, France, Portugal and the Australian countryside, but most chapters use experiences from many places to illustrate themes. If you insist on using this as a guidebook, the index is your roadmap.

Readers who bought an earlier book of mine, called The Obsessive Traveller, will recognise some of its tales and theories here. That book covered the first 20 years of my travelling life, mostly solo. This book adds the adventures of a decade since then, but draws on many of those earlier adventures to make new points about transport, eating, sleeping, reading and romance on the road.

In the intervening decade I have collected an extended family of frequent fellow travellers — a wife, a daughter, a nephew, a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law — who have enlarged and transformed my ideas about the best way to go. They probably won't agree with many theories I develop here, but they still have to share the blame for the way this book turned out. I thank them for their insights and I look forward to our next journey.

I'm also grateful to 400 readers of The Obsessive Traveller, who wrote to me seeking a list of Italy's "Buon Ricordo" restaurants which I'd mentioned in that book, and then used their letters to take up some of my notions. I'd like to maintain that dialogue, so if you want to discuss any of the points I raise (or even just receive the latest Buon Ricordo list) you can write to me care of the publishers, or e-mail me on ddale@essentialideas.info.

I've always thought that the most important preparation for any journey is to know what you're looking for (while remaining open to diversions), and I hope this book will help some readers to formulate their goals. I believe we visit strange places in order to discover how other people achieve happiness. I'm horrified by any traveller who answers the question "why are you going there?" with "just to have a look". If you've done no research and developed no mission, you have no tools for focussing your lens, and thus no way to learn anything useful about the culture you're interacting with. But travellers vary in the number of targets they want to hit during a journey, on a spectrum from "See everything now because we may not pass this way again" to "See one good thing each day".

The latter view was articulated by the 19th century guidebook writer Augustus Hare, who appears in chapter 12, and who said: "Better far to leave half the ruins and nine tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life's recollections."

One morning, on the Greek island of Hydra (pronounced eedra), I was having breakfast at the quayside with my friend Bill. He asked what I was planning to do that day. "I thought I'd climb the hill to the monastery and try to see the mainland across the water," I replied. "They've got a cemetery up there so I'll have a look round that. Then I'll come back down and have lunch at the goatherders' restaurant ..."

I continued with a program that included taking a boat to the neighbouring island of Spetses to retrace the footsteps of John Fowles in The Magus, then doing some washing in my hotel and hanging it out on the clothesline they conveniently provide on their roof, finishing with dinner at Hydra's only Chinese restaurant, Pirofani.

Bill looked at me wearily. "Where are you now?" he asked. "Er, I'm on Hydra," I replied. "No you're not," he said. "You're in Manhattan. You've got every moment of the day planned out. You're just going to rush from morning till night. You can't do that here. On Hydra you do one thing each day.
My thing today is going to the post office to collect my mail. And when you've done your one thing, you sit around and talk, or think, or look at the ocean. And especially you — you're supposed to
be on holidays.'

In order to justify the journey, I must be challenged by a new idea every day, and I have to keep moving till that new idea appears. Part of this compulsiveness is no doubt the result of being Australian, and thus of living a long way from everything. In a book called Stranger Wonders, published in 1937, the English author Christopher Sykes suggests that the English do so much travelling (and so much travel writing) because they have an ancient feeling of "residing on the outskirts of the Roman Empire" and thus suspect that "we are not wholly satisfactory".

How much stronger must that suspicion be in a nation that resides on the outskirts of the British Empire? Sykes says the sense of inferiority leads to a desire to "escape from oneself" and "the easiest relief is in foreign travel". For Australians, the relief doesn't come so easily — the places we yearn for are far away and expensive, especially in the early 21st century. But we still have to go.

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