'They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind,' wrote GK Chesterton in 1921. The following year saw him pressing his point in What I Saw In America: 'I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind,' he noted.

Chesterton was tilting at what he saw as the blinkered attitude of the majority of tourists. Since that time, film and television have opened new windows on the world for us all, so does today's armchair traveller actually enjoy the best all-round view'

'An enormous amount of my impetus to travel came from David Attenborough and nature programmes,' says AA Gill. 'Attenborough was my dad's boss at BBC2, and he did a programme called Zoo Quest which I adored as a child. Then there were people like Armand and Michaela Dennis, and Hans and Lotte Hass. Michaela was always rather sexy in boots and jodhpurs, standing there with those huge cameras.'

The young Gill informed his grandmother that when he grew up, he wanted to travel the world drawing birds. 'In a sense, I'd still like to,' he confesses. 'Later, it was Alan Whicker who influenced me journalistically. He had that ability to make a comment just by leaving a pause and folding his arms. I've since met him and he's the most charming man. He was a tremendous hero.

'Michael Palin's programmes are amazing tours, though they're not journalistic; they're all about Palin, his incredibly attractive personality on TV and his great sympathy. You want to travel with him ' he's a sort of humanist missionary.

'But I don't think Michael Palin or David Attenborough or anyone similar would ever say what they offer is an 'instead-of' experience. I have enormous respect for what they do and get enormous pleasure out of it, but there is no sense that you have been there through your television set from your armchair.

'We get most of our information about the world from our televisions, but I'm very nervous about any such suggestion. I remember watching one of Palin's very good programmes about the Himalayas, when he went to Peshawar and did a story about going to see a dentist.

'Peshawar is a place of refugee Afghans, where the Taliban go to rest and recuperate. It's the oldest smugglers' market in the world, the end of the Grand Trunk Road that goes up to meet the Silk Route through Afghanistan ' it's an enormous number of things. Palin's piece wasn't wrong: it was very amusing, but it was an insight into Palin and a dentist.

'My stories are exactly the same. I fix on one thing and one person or a small event. You hope that it illuminates more than the sum of its parts, but there's great danger in claiming that you have somehow cracked the soul or the essence of a place.'

Would fronting a good travel show for television appeal' 'I have enough friends who appear on television to know that you exchange a lot of personal freedom for the cachet and the money and the experience,' Gill explains. 'You have to be prepared to make a Faustian pact and be clear that what you're getting out of it is worth handing over your persona. As a journalist, I'd find that quite difficult.'

As a TV critic, in any case, he agrees that turning gamekeeper could be a hiding to nothing. There is a precedent, however ' former Observer television reviewer Clive4 James. Gill was a fan of James's Postcards series of travel programmes. 'I thought they were terrific, and I suppose I would think quite long and hard if I had the chance to do something between Clive James and Alan Whicker.'

Pushover
AA Gill describes himself as a 'pushover' as a traveller. 'Even if places are horrible, I sort of love them for being horrible. I'm excited by the process of travel; I'm an incredibly easy tourist. And a lot of people aren't. From the start, they find the whole thing a torture of insecurity and trepidation. They worry about being ripped off and poisoned or bitten. That isn't me, though I have scared myself rigid at times in certain places.'

Even when writing about the most outlandish place, Gill hopes his reports will make people want to see it for themselves. 'I'm not a cheerleader for the travel industry but as far as I know, we're only travelling through the world once, and not to go and see as much of it as possible seems a terrible waste. I think anybody who dies not having seen India has led a life in black and white.

'I just wrote a piece about Greenland, and it is the most fantastic place. In terms of staggering, weird beauty it's astonishing, but it's actually not that far away, nor that expensive to get there.'

But as demand starts to mount that we restrict our carbon footprints, for how long will we be able to indulge in the luxury of travel' Could we end up relying on vicarious on-screen travel, whether we like it or not'

'I'm lucky ' my generation is the one that got cheap flights and package holidays. It was a relatively safe world, we could get abroad for very little and still can. But the present Petrol Age will be a moment in history, and one of the things that will be hardest to rationalise is the gas needed for mass transit around the world. I am very optimistic that there will be something else, but one of the most depressing and anti-human things about the Green movement is that in essence it's an anti-movement movement. It's all about never going anywhere you can't cycle to.'

Ecotourism doesn't appeal, then' 'It's a marketing ploy. I wouldn't want to go on most ecological tours because they just sound so miserable. Also there's a fantastic vanity about them ' it's as if this travelling business is all about you, about what you do, what you wear, what you leave behind.

'Forget that. It's actually about the people and places and what you see in them, what you can learn from them. If you travel to somewhere poorer than where you've come from, it's about what you leave behind that makes a difference. It isn't all about you and your bloody carbon footprints!'

Right here, right now
Reflecting the general trend of the tourist market, Adrian Gill's preferred style of travelling is likely to be a blitz visit. 'When I'm writing stories, I like it to be a very intense, quick experience. And because Americans, for example, are allowed to take only tiny amounts of holiday, they want a concentrated, luxurious experience. So they go to resorts that offer them spas, sports, eating, sun and entertainment all at once, four days in and out.

'I'm not averse to being pampered, but these places leave the impression that the4 whole world is happening behind bougainvillea-clad walls, and that all the locals wear bow ties. And nothing like enough of the wealth from these big tourist encampments stays in the country.'

Such travel may bear out Chesterton's observations, but broadening the mind is not its aim. 'What people want from going abroad is essentially what they got last time ' guaranteed sunshine, a swimming pool, a sandy beach, food they like, air conditioning, beds with certain sorts of pillows, an ethnic experience that's aesthetic and comfortable, probably a bar, a massage and a local market. And if you can produce those things, you get tourists.

'What's a shame is that most of the world doesn't have that, and if it does it's because it's imported it. The original name for Sri Lanka was the island of Serendip, and serendipity is the real ingredient of the joy of travelling.

'What I love are the things that aren't on the menu, the things that go wrong and lead you somewhere else, deciding to go left instead of right. But if everything you expect is determined by the weather, for example, if it isn't sunny you're rather knackered. And often, in places that are sunny 99 per cent of the time, being there when it's raining is one of the most magical times, when the local people really love it.'

Near and far
Adrian Gill has written that we're all closer than we think and further than we imagine. 'I went to see the Maasai in Tanzania. We stood in this cattle byre while they shot arrows into a cow's leg and they handed me the gourd. We drank the blood and had a sort of dinner
party chat ' you know, where do your children go to school, what are property prices like around here'

'They were all beautiful, dressed in red tartan robes and beads and the women with braided hair, and I remember thinking, this is about as 'other' as you'll get. Later the headman, with his big lotus-leaf spear, said he would walk me back to the road, as it was dark. As we walked up through the bush, he said: 'You know I'm not just a farmer, I'm the local teacher.' I asked him what he taught and he said English. I said how interesting, and he said: 'Do you know the novels of James Hadley Chase''

'In a moment like that, the world expands and contracts again. It happens all the time, that sense of being enormously distant and fantastically close.'

That noted, Gill points out that the distance we travel from central London to central Africa is greater in terms of technology, opportunity and life expectancy than when Livingstone made the journey. 'We assume that the world is a global village, that everyone's plugged into MTV and the Internet. Yet most people in the world have never made a phone call.

'I think the truth is that travel both broadens and narrows the mind. But in a sense, the question should be not: 'Does travel broaden your mind'' but: 'Does your travelling broaden other people's minds'