John Biggin is an American who has been inspired to travel and to write about travel since he was a child. This is an extract from one of his essays.

A Great travel writing is infused with a sense of wonder. A phenomenon that cannot be conclusively defined, it remains best comprehended by its effects. A great narrative of travel is the product of a writer for whom the given subject is but a convenient focus - a chance to draw upon a personal vision that exists before and after any number of its expressions. Unfortunately, a sense of wonder cannot be taught or learnt. Rather it is something like a musical sense - if not quite a matter of absolute pitch, then a disposition, something in the genes as different from judgment as the incidence of brown eyes or blue. When it's there, its presence is indisputable; when it's absent, it's not likely to be grieved over.

B Some years ago, I spent a few days in Beirut - one of them on an excursion to Baalbek to see the great temple of the sun associated with its ancient name, Heliopolis. The trip was made in a minibus full of strangers with a Lebanese driver. When our visit to the gigantic ruins was over, we squeezed back into our seats in a stunned silence that seemed the only appropriate response to such awesome magnificence. This spell lasted for many miles, broken, finally, by the muffled syllables with which each of us tried to describe the indescribable. The last to open her mouth was an American who finally uttered the immortal words: " What I want to know, " she said, " is how our tour company finds these places."

C In order for the sense of wonder to express itself, it must, professionally speaking, call upon the spirit of investigation. Whereas wonder is a receptive state which simply widens or contracts in response to stimuli, the spirit of investigation is active, charged with curiosity, avid to know how and why things come to be, how they work, to what they may be compared, how they fit into any scheme that may render them comprehensible. It is a spirit concerned with something that can be translated, first for love and then for as much cold cash as may be extracted from the editors of glossy journals. Functioning at its best, the spirit of investigation relates the observer to the observed and makes the exotic familiar.

D By description, measurement, and statistics, the spirit of investigation allows the writer's sense of wonder to go to work. The writer is thus able to unite subjective thoughts with objective evidence, to connect the poetry with the prose and so nudge travel writing away from its current status as a consumer report into a literary genre. And since all travel writing is, inescapably, a form of autobiography, I'd like to cite a few instances, a fewfortunate moments when, indulging my own sense of wonder and driven by the spirit of investigation, I tried to find a balance that would justify my pretensions to a place somewhere in the vicinity of those writers whose chronicles of travel experience I most admire.

E Of all the images that passed before my eyes in mid-childhood, two affected me like summonses. One was a colored illustration on the cover of a geography book of the young Christopher Columbus, the man who discovered the Americas, richly dressed in velvet, gazing westward from a deepwater dock in Genoa. There, I thought, was a boy no older than me who, just like me, had the whole world in his head and still looked forward to another. The second was a painting of what seemed to me a celestial city. Situated at the conjunction of a river and an ocean, it was the scene of dazzling energy as flotillas of ships steamed in and out, railroad trains snaked across lacework bridges, and airplanes with open cockpits soared above steeples and tall smokestacks. I knew at first glance I had seen the city of my dreams. The fact that it would turn out to be New London, Connecticut - industrial New London! - did nothing to diminish that first impression. Whenever I'm in New London, and that is often, I simply paste my old fantasy over its reality and go on my way.

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