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Sat 07 Jul 2007World visionAnna Mundowdelights in meeting the travel writer Colin Thubron who, like his 19th-century counterparts, can sleep anywhere, eat anything, and react calmly to almost any calamityThe New Yorker magazine's most famous cover is Saul Steinberg's fanciful map of the world from Manhattan's 9th Avenue on which terra incognito begins at New Jersey. Expand that idea and here is how the planet might appear to the average American today. China: tainted pet food, contaminated toothpaste, farm animals raised on human waste, can you believe it? Russia: president looks like the new James Bond and just got all touchy about our missiles, lighten up will ya? Middle East: crazy Arabs, why can't they just get along? Afghanistan: sort of like the Middle East, with mountains, and every guy wears a beard. Iran: even crazier guys with beards and a president in a seriously bad suit. Meanwhile, as Joe Six-Pack surveys the world from Fortress America, his European counterpart flits around the old eastern bloc, having massages in Budapest and stag nights in Zagreb. Regions that once enticed the romantic traveller are either off-limits or on-sale, and travel writers have been transformed into commandos storming hostile territory or buffoons clowning their way through alien transactions.