Trek! by Claes Grundsten - Reviewed

We know a pre-Christmas book when we see one and Trek! by award-winning Swedish nature photographer Claes Grundsten is definitely destined to find its way under the odd indoor pine tree.

The book, as you may guess from the sub-title - 'the best trekking in the world' - is a lavishly illustrated tour of the 40 trekking routes that Grundsten rates as 'the best'. Of course you can always question why the Everest Base Camp trek is worthy of inclusion, while the Annapurna Sanctuary isn't and wonder why the entire Karakorum's been left out, but there's no real point and no right answers either.

It's better to look at stuff like this as a directory of dreams, something to spark ideas, remind you of places you've already been to and inspire you to visit others you may never have heard of. So it's nice that alongside Everest, the Inca Trail, Kili, Mont Blanc and the Torres del Paine, there are less obvious areas like the Pirin Mountains of Bulgaria, Kebnekaise - Sweden's highest peak - and Roraima in Venezuela, a colossal table mountain rising from the grassland and cloud forests.

Pictures...

You can generally assume with glossy, weighty, coffee table tomes like this that the photography will be technically excellent and nicely reproduced but also slightly predictable with beautiful sweeping landscapes interspersed with character shots of locals that always seem to look a tad posed and synthetic and so it is with this one.

I guess if you're producing a big, glossy hardback then ripping open the belly of social deprivation and spillng its guts across the page isn't really on the agenda, but it makes for a bland experience. Travel without the noise and smells.

... and words.

Similarly, you know that books like this exist for the visuals and anything remotely readable on the facing pages is a small bonus. Grundsten may be a literary genius in his native Swedish, but in translation, it's all bit plodding, lightweight and whimsical; the man makes Michael Palin seem like Hemmingway.

Reading about Peru's Cordillera Blanca where I spent six weeks climbing a few years back gave me no feel of what it was really like; the smells, the crispness, the thin air and the friendly but slightly distant local people are conspicuous by their absence.

Similarly, what makes the Everest trek so astonishing, if you start from Jiri in particular, is the way the landscape shape-shifts and changes as you crawl inexorably upwards towards the desolation that lies under Everest itself. And that, together with your fellow trekkers, is what it's all about. And, I suppose what trekking is about.

Strangely, for a book called Trek!, there's largely an absence of the sense of travelling or journey. Nice pictures to look at then, but don't expect too much more.

Trek! is published this month by Duncan Baird Publishers and will cost £25. More details at www.dbponline.co.uk