Hot Countries

Travel writing from the elder brother of Evelyn Waugh, covering a selection of his travels as a young man in 1926-29, here republished (unaltered except for the foreword) in 1948. Primarily Tahiti and Martinique, with sidelines in Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Haiti and Vanuatu (Siam, Malaya, Ceylon, Haiti and New Hebrides, as they were known then!).

In the new foreword, the author states Travel in those years was pleasant, easy and cheap. Railways and steamship lines had recently made accessible a number of out-of-the-way places that a few years earlier could only be reached with great difficulty and considerable financial cost, while the aeroplane had not yet brought them within range of the nine day vacationist. There were no currency regulations then. There was no trouble with visas. Ships were not crowded. You could always get a cabin to yourself. The contemporary reader of the book may well imagine me to have been a wealthy person. Far from it. I had no private income and was earning with my pen under twelve hundred pounds a year. But in June 1926 I was able to buy from the Messageries Maritimes a round-the-world ticket that included four months of first class accommodation for £163. During a five months' trip in the West Indies I spent under £400. To a fiction writer like myself who had no ties, who could carry his office with him, world travel offered not only glamour, romance, adventure, what you will, but a practical and economical solution of many problems of livelihood. I was lucky to have been born when I was. I had access to a great deal of fun during the years when I was most capable of enjoying it.Today, of course, that is all over. The world is divided into zones. There are currency regulations, visa problems, and a lack of transport. Passages can only be booked with great difficulty and journeys made with great discomfort. Every hotel in the world is overcrowded. It will be many years before free and light-hearted travel is possible again.

He goes on to say he had considered updating the text for this edition, but so much had changed in the intervening 20 years and that today in 1947, in a world so different that we might be existing on another planet, I thought it better to offer Hot Countries to a new generation of reader frankly as a period piece, unaltered as I wrote it, a picture of a way of living that exists no longer.

When I read the foreword, of which I reproduced over half, I imagined I would really enjoy this book. It really started a a five star book, then after Martinique, I think lost its way a little and devolved to a 3.5 star book. Because of the bits I really enjoyed, I have stuck with 4 stars.