Book review: Hidden Places, by Sarah Baxter, illustrated by Amy Grimes

As mercilessly parodied in William Sutcliffe’s 1997 gap year novel, Are You Experienced?, there is a certain kind of tourist who is never content simply to be a tourist.

Sarah Baxter

Such people usually style themselves as “travellers,” sometimes even as “adventurers” or “explorers,” and they will go to great lengths in order to differentiate themselves from all the common or garden tourists who are happy to lounge around beside the hotel pool, drinking cocktails and enjoying the sun.


One of the main ways in which these adventurous spirits like to mark themselves out from the herd is by visiting places that are “off the beaten track”, and this book by travel writer Sarah Baxter is full of the kinds of obscure destinations that are guaranteed to produce smug grins in the airport departure lounge on the way home. 


For anyone looking for a little escapism during lockdown, meanwhile, Hidden Places offers a virtual travel experience that is colourful, educational and also 100 per cent safe.  


As you’d expect from a former associate editor of Wanderlust Magazine, Baxter has a real knack for conjuring up the atmosphere of the places she visits. When she writes of kneeling on the “rough, rug-covered floors” of Lalibela – the ancient complex of underground churches in the Amhara region of Ethiopia – you sense that she has done just that. 


Similarly, when she explains that in order to enter the jungle-shrouded cave of Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize you must “sink into the chill turquoise pool” at its mouth and then “paddle through the slit into the entrance cavern” you feel this is something she has experienced for herself. 


An enterprising copywriter could probably have produced something similar to Hidden Places from the comfort of their kitchen table, simply by using Google Earth and Wikipedia, but it wouldn’t have anything like the same immediacy. 
That said, Baxter is too subtle a wordsmith to ladle on the “my personal journey of discovery” stuff. As her years at Wanderlust no doubt taught her, there’s a fine but significant line between hinting that you’re speaking from personal experience and making the story all about you. 


The mini-essays that make up Hidden Places have just enough specificity to make them authentic, but still leave room for budding travellers/adventurers/explorers to picture themselves in the role of intrepid hero.


Amy Grimes’s stylised illustrations operate in a similar way. Guidebooks full of perfect photographs can often have the effect of leaving you feeling a little deflated when you finally arrive at a fabled location after a long and difficult journey, only to encounter it looking less than spectacular on a dull, overcast day. Slightly cartoonish and stripped of detail, the images in Hidden Places leave plenty to the imagination, making them the ideal companions to Baxters’s tantalising texts. 

Hidden Places, by Sarah Baxter, illustrated by Amy Grimes, White Lion, £14.99