The best travel writers let their noses lead the way to a nice place to visit THESE DAYS the cachet of the travel writer is greater than that of the novelist, since the latter must imagine Illyria while living in Orillia. Too often, however, the former goes to Valhalla (oh, I know it`s a one-way ticket) to write the prose equivalent of Kelowna (ditto, perhaps). Only obituarists write in a more formulaic way than travel writers. In the products of the latter the adjective has hegemony. Not as in "stately, plump Buck Mulligan!` of Ulysses, but as in "shimmering" seas and "spectacular" vistas. Also, alas, as in "interesting" people who turn out to be the most wooden of guides to a culture not remotely as interesting as the almighty Buck`s. In The Saturday Night Traveller (HarperCollins, 211 pages, $16.95 paper), edited by George Galt, for instance, caddies aplenty cart Saturday Night travellers around the fairways (and ugly ways) of the world. In Charlotte Gray`s piece on Japan there is "pretty, thirty-year-old Kaoru." In Ivor Shapiro`s "African Steam," a Zimbabwean sortie, one finds Norma, "known in Hwange as the Witch on the Hill, because of her caftans, her husky voice, and her habit of gliding silently through the halls." In Ernest Hillen~ dip into Indonesia, "The Swimming Pool," "the English-speaking driver, helpful Rusli Sunanjaya," is the designated schlepper. These and other denizens of the exotic and the exotic travel tale frequently work better for their authors than they do for their authors` tales. The travel writer`s output is often a backpack full of touristic collectibles rather than a room full of false doors and Byzantine connections. How much easier it is, it seems, for Berlitz to groom Cairo than for literary critics to tame the sprawl of Lawrence Durrell`s Alexandria. (This is not to exculpate literary salons, which are usually far less lively than hair salons and in most cities are outnumbered only by travel agencies.) As if out of Berlitz, travel books invariably offer a smattering of local dialect: "Congee is rice boiled to a mush"; "Carriage attendants (in China) are called Mafoo"; "For those of you planning a sauna in Finland, " `Oikein kuuma! VERY HOT!"` Travel writing, much of the time, produces the same yawns as tourists` photos. Still, for those readerly types who have recently strayed no farther than the cottage, there are some compelling snapshots in the five books under review. George Galt`s nose may be a little too elegant (a word that occurs a little too frequently in his prose, to the point where Corsican rose wines are described by him as "far more elegant than the much vaunted roses of Provence?`). Nonetheless, his editorial span at Saturday Night proves (to mix body parts) that he`s got an occasionally good nose. The best bouquet in this collection culled from Saturday Night comes from pieces by Kildare Dobbs (still writin` after all these years) on Turkey and Ronald Wright on Peru. Dobbs`s breeziness serves him well and gives his peregrinations a madcap quality: "The driver removed a bazaar-music cassette, which was filling the car with arabesques of pain." Dobbs can also switch gears faster than his caddy, the guy who drove him after the bus on which he`d left his baggage. "Aspect of driver: small, birdlike, eager to help the foreign traveller, a good sport" becomes, two pages later, "Aspect of driver: ... hypocritical religious fanatic, perverted by greed. Pederastic tendencies. Evil xenophobe." Dobbs teaches the reader words irrelevant to the speaker of Berlitz, the official language and culture: "leptorrhine, which distinguishes someone having a long, thin schnozzle." Nasologist and wit, Dobbs has a nose for the non-portentous. Wright`s piece, "Peru is not a Novel," is pithy and powerful. Producing what Donald Barthelme once called "short, punchy sentences," Wright writes political apercus with the pace of someone on Benzedrine. Another fine article in The Saturday Night Traveller, this one with pathos, is Gary Ross`s "Distant Intimacies," about death in Venice. Oberon Press has produced a congeries of reminiscences a.k.a. travel books by three Canadian women about diverse parts of the globe in diverse times. The best of the three books - a find, in fact - is Margaret MacLean`s The Wise Traveller (114 pages, $21.95 cloth, $10.95 paper). MacLean, the daughter of a commercial agent to Japan at the turn of the century, embarked at 34 years of age on a trip to China. This chronicle of her visit during a turbulent period in China, one of strong anti-foreign feeling, was published in 1906 as the somewhat inappropriately titled Chinese Ladies at Home. Soon out of print, it was recently rediscovered and has been reprinted under the auspices of Beverley Stappells and Pam Young, the former contributing a lucid introduction. Although too kind toward missionaries and their gospel, MacLean is otherwise rarely anything except a trenchant and fearless adventurer and observer. She is also aware of the possibly loaded nature of her own prose: "`Swarm` is not usually the word when referring to people," Her cultural comparisons are refreshingly non-elitist: "Why should we make such a fuss about a poor Chinaman eating a rat? As though a rat could have a more objectionable taste than some of our cheese - Stilton or Limburger...." If "times were exciting" has a postcardy ring, the crisp, controlled way she reports on the Shanghai riots of 1905 gives her descriptions an other-than-feckless quality. Oberon`s other two offerings, Elfreida Read`s Congee and Peanut Butter ( xxx,141 pages, $23.95 cloth) and Katherine Bermingham`s A Winter in Paris (198 pages, $29.95 cloth, $15.95 paper), are less interesting because the authors come off as less combative. Read writes about a potentially powerful topic, her two and a half years in a concentration camp after being removed by the Japanese from her home in Shanghai`s International Settlement soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Somehow the terror and deprivation do not make it onto the page. Still, some poignant moments, such as when Read learns of a friend`s death, do occur. Bermingham`s winter (of 1923) in Paris is rendered in letters home that are a little too gushing and touristy. Bermingham writes in her introduction, "We [young women] lived very sheltered lives and wouldn`t have thought of going against the wishes of our parents as long as we were dependent on them" Naomi Jackson Groves`s Winter into Summer: Lapland Diary 1945-1946 (Penumbra, 197 pages, $19.95 paper) is congeneric with the three books reviewed above. At the end of the Second World War Groves volunteered for and partook in a Quaker relief effort in Finnish Lapland. Because the book is assembled, for the most part, from her diaries, it is loaded with an excess of mundane data. Mostly I got frissons from the frigid temperatures Groves records. That is not an insignificant bit of excitation. The landscape "Uncle A. Y. J." (the artist A. Y. Jackson) used as a model has frozen over and many of us have sought out stock tourist venues. On our postcards, in our own prose "30`C" will be all the poetry we can muster. Or need.