Next time you find yourself complaining that your journey into work was “a nightmare” because of a few signal failures, think about the poor souls on the “Train of Death” (also known as “The Beast”), which thousands of poor people ride through Mexico in the hope of realising their “American dream”. For many, the journey ends with robbery, rape or death, as a story in today’s El País points out. The headline translates roughly as: “Don’t sleep; whatever you do, don’t sleep.”

Here’s an earlier CNN video, with commentary in English, about the train:

Radio 4′s Excess Baggage show, which I contributed to yesterday, is available online.

Walter Salles’s film of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is due out next year, and will doubtless be accompanied by repackaged versions in print of what’s already an over-exposed novel.

A much less familiar contribution to American travel literature has just made its first appearance on this side of the pond: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, by F Scott Fitzgerald (Hesperus Press). It’s a fictionalised account of an eight-day trip made by Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from Connecticut to Alabama. They set out with dreams of the biscuits and peaches of the South, and end up limping from garage to garage in a banger he calls the Expenso.

Julian Evans (biographer of Norman Lewis), who has been badgering publishers here for years to bring out the piece — written originally as a series for a motoring magazine –  contributes a critical introduction, and there’s a foreword from Paul Theroux. Together, their contributions run to 19 pages, and Fitzgerald’s text itself is only about 56 pages. If that seems a little unbalanced (and so does Fitzgerald in his casual racism), this is still a jolly Wodehousian jaunt, and revealing both of Fitzgerald and of the way he turned his life into fiction.

Newspapers are fond of using the word “as” in the standfirsts above feature articles in order to suggest that the material below couldn’t be fresher. E.g.: “As The Rum Diaries opens, Johnny Depp explains how it came to be set in Puerto Rico.” The Evening Standard went a bit too far yesterday, implying a bit of time-travelling on the part of its interviewee: “As he opens Britain’s biggest casino in Westfield Stratford tomorrow, Damian Aspinall talks … about gambling, girlfriends … and a passion for gorillas…”

Surprised by the stories of Pakistan’s cricket-match fixing ring? I was much more shocked by a story I came across last week, while on a birdwatching trip to Catalonia.

There’s a tradition there of holding contests in which songbirds are encouraged to compete against one another in sweetness and volume. According to a report in La Vanguardia, the handlers, not content with the performance of their birds, have begun to dope them with something called unte, the principal ingredient of which is testosterone. If X-Factor ratings continue falling, surely it’s only a matter of time before Simon Cowell gets the same idea.

“I am haunted by waters,” says the narrator in the last line of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It.
I think I must be, too. To help publicise my new anthology, Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper (which Aurum will publish on Monday), I was asked by the managers of the Telegraph’s book shop to come up with a list of my favourite travel books. When I did, I was surprised to find how many of them touch on water. Here (in no particular order apart from the first) are my top 10.

Coasting by Jonathan Raban (Picador) How far do you have to go to write a travel book? Just around home if you’re Jonathan Raban, who sees Thatcherite Britain — and himself — with the detachment of a foreigner from the deck of his 30ft ketch. It’s a book inspired by Tristram Shandy, with digressions into everything from memoir to lit crit. I press it into the hands of all would-be travel writers.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee (Penguin) Spain as seen in 1934 by a young poet who was hungry for experience, and often just hungry. He sailed to Vigo with a knapsack, a fiddle and enough Spanish to order a glass of water. “I didn’t bother to wonder what would happen then, for already I saw myself there, brown as an apostle, walking the white dust roads through the orange groves.”

Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis (Picador) is the great man’s account of a village on the Costa Brava before the arrival of concrete; a place where the fishermen reported their successes and failures in blank verse and a stuffed dugong known as “the mermaid” decorated the bar. It has all the qualities that made Lewis one of our finest travel writers: the unfailing eye for oddity, the lyrical prose, the gentle humour.

Venice by Jan Morris (Faber) Guidebooks need updating; love letters don’t. Morris published this one in 1960. Though Venice has changed and so has the writer — she no longer loves the city in the way she did — a first-time visitor in possession of a copy is guaranteed to be smitten.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (Penguin). Of men and microscopes, you might say. Steinbeck takes a 4,000-mile geography field trip with his biologist friend Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in the novel Cannery Row) into the Gulf of California, where they enjoy “a real tempest in our small teapot minds”.

River Town by Peter Hessler (John Murray) What would it be like to spend two years as an American peace corps volunteer teaching English in a small city in China? And what would the Chinese make of such a volunteer? Hessler’s achievement is to answer both those questions, in a tender, empathetic book about his two years in Fuling, on the Yangtze.

India File by Trevor Fishlock (John Murray) Before he was the Telegraph’s man in Moscow, in the momentous days of Gorbachev, Trevor Fishlock was the Times’s man in Delhi. This book was first published then, in 1983, and could hardly be said to be up to the minute, but its 200 pages still make for a great primer in what can initially be an overwhelming country. “Thanks for recommending India File,” I’ve often been told. “It made a great trip even better.”

Watermen by Randall S Peffer (Johns Hopkins University Press) Key “Watermen” and “Maryland” into a search engine, and this will pop up near the top of the results. I came across it years ago the old-fashioned way — browsing in local bookshops. It’s a vivid and salty account of a year Peffer spent with the fishermen of the Chesapeake Bay on their graceful sailing boats, the skipjacks.

Frontiers of Heaven by Stanley Stewart (Flamingo) “No one has ever spoken well of Urumqui, and I am unable to break with this miserable tradition,” says Stanley Stewart of the capital of Xinjiang. But he writes extremely well — of Urumqi as well as all the other stops on this journey through China beyond the Great Wall, for which he won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book of the Year Award in 1996.

Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater (Picador) Most of us travel to get away from rain; Frater goes looking for it, all the way round India, finding romance in mud, slush and puddles, and joining in the rejoicing and sense of renewal that accompany the downpour.

In Telegraph Travel this week we are running a selection of pictures from The Sacred India Book, a superlative new work by the photographer Amit Pasricha. He documents rite and ritual in panoramic pictures that not only convey a strong sense of place but make you feel as though you are in that place. It’s hard to do them justice online or even when displaying them across the spread of a broadsheet paper, as we do tomorrow (Saturday). They really have to be seen in the book . . .

For more on Pasricha’s work, see www.panoramas.in.

If you like blues and soul, you’ll love the Alabama Shakes. Their debut EP is due out shortly. For the moment, you can stream a few of their songs on their website.

The addition of cloud, paywall and tweet to The Chambers English Dictionary suggests that lexicographers are keeping up with the times. Or are they? How, in this world of  increasing miniaturisation, do they get away with their abuse of the adjective “pocket”?

In the 15^th century, a “poket” [sic] in Anglo-Norman usage was “a little bag”, and the second definition of the modern noun in the Collins English Dictionary (2004) is “any bag or pouch”.

But surely most of us, on hearing the word, picture the thing described in that dictionary’s first definition: “a small bag or pouch in a garment for carrying small articles”.

In the Oxford Dictionary of English (second edition, revised), pocket as an adjective is defined as “of a suitable size for carrying in a pocket: a pocket German dictionary”.

My Pocket Oxford Spanish Dictionary measures about seven and three quarter inches by about five and one eighth inches (196 x 129mm) and runs to 1,088 pages. In which pocket am I supposed to put that?

I got back from a holiday last week to the usual blizzard of emails. Among them was one from a woman in PR acting for a luxury resort in Asia. She had recently arranged a stay at the resort for a ballerina, she said, and the ballerina was now keen to write a travel article for us about it. If I were hoping to move into the territory of Carlos Acosta, I’d first offer proof that I could dance.