I won't bore you with any other passages (I promise), but here is the opening of The Sketchbook:

Bangkok, Thailand

It has been ten days now since I set out from England to the Far East. If I haven't written much since, it is in part literary constipation (the curries, surprisingly, haven't helped) and in part because, for most of these days, it seems to me that I changed hostels more than I changed places. Although this is not true, I have to admit I've spent more waking hours indoors than outdoors.

How did this happen? (Are rhetorical questions in or out of the travel writing scene?)

The heat, for one, this wet jungle heat that permeates every street, infiltrates every shadow, seems to melt our morale, weaken our bodies into a putty-like state of flaccid languor and has us scramble for our air-conditioned haunts. Then, if we didn't get here jet-lagged, we seem to have made ourselves so: the Euro-cup games are on until 4 or 5 every morning and staying up wrecked our internal clocks. We can literally listen to the cogs jam and spark and jump in and out of gear randomly, always out of beat. Thirdly, and if I leave this for last, it is because I think it may have been greatly influenced by the previous two, none of the places we saw really captured our imagination or truly convinced us.