Place is at one and the same time easy and impossible to define. For most of us, certain locations provide us with a distinct sense of place. The family home, the hotel in which we stayed on a memorable journey, the bench on which we had our first kiss; all such would quite naturally count as ‘places’. While it may make a great deal of sense to us intuitively and practically, place has however proven very hard to theorize. ‘Place can be difficult to locate’, artists Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar (2005, 11, 14) point out, precisely because ‘place is something more often sensed than understood, an indistinct region of awareness rather than something clearly defined’. Place is also politically volatile. As geographer Doreen Massey remarks, place is often used for reactionary purposes, deployed as a ‘locus of denial, of attempted withdrawal from invasion/difference’ (2005, 5–6), as well as ‘sites of nostalgia, of the opting-out from Progress and History’ (1994, 5). Place in this instance can be construed as the very opposite of travel: as a bastion of stasis and sameness intended to keep out all that which is different, itinerant, other and exotic.

Place, as well as the absence of place, is however of great importance to travel writing. For if travel is dependent on a sensation of difference and otherness, of moving from one (familiar) place to another (different) place, then the very activity of travel may seem nonsensical without such changes in spatial register. Indeed, as Robert T. Tally Jr. (2013, 13) argues in Spatiality, ‘the traveller, whether forced into exile or willingly engaged in tourism, cannot help but be more aware of the distinctiveness of a given place, and of the remarkable differences between places’. Travel, if we are to take Tally's lead, makes us acutely aware of the ‘distinctiveness’ of place. Hence to engage in the activity of travel is to engage in the practice of place.

Whereas earlier forms of travel writing had little difficulty in discerning such ‘remarkable differences between places’ (Tally 2013), contemporary travellers have found it increasingly challenging to locate any such distinctions. For early travellers, it was simply a question of going where no, or at least very few, of their kind had gone before.