When is a travel writer not a travel writer? When he makes his stuff up.
Laurens Van der Post was one of the most fascinating men of the twentieth century. Born to a farming family in South Africa in 1906, he eked out his twenties and thirties as a journalist in South Africa, Japan and England. Van der Post's major opportunity came, as it came for so many young men of his generation, with the Second World War.
Signing up as an officer with the Intelligence Corps of the British Army, Van der Post participated in the war against the Italians in Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) before being invalided out with malaria. Later, because of the Dutch language skills he had acquired by being an Afrikaans speaker, he was posted to Java in the Dutch East Indies ahead of the Japanese invasion. He was ultimately captured by the Japanese, and spent nearly three years enduring the brutality of their prisoner-of-war camps. He survived the camps, building a reputation as an inspiring leader by his unwillingness to let the camp regime get him down and his initiative in running education schemes for inmates.
He stayed on in the army for a while, witnessesing the Japanese surrender and earning honors for his work in the far east. After the war he wrote some of the classic travel books of the second half of the twentieth century. Journeying through Africa and beyond, he introduced the world to the secluded civilisation of the Kalahari Bushmen, and was instrumental in getting the fledgeling environmentalist movement off the ground.
In his old age he was famous for being a friend and advisor of Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, and a confidante of Margaret Thatcher. When he died in 1996, he was lauded as a great man of letters.
And a great storyteller he most certainly was - research by biographers has revealed that most of his travel writing, and perhaps some of his war record, seems to have been based on fabrication. He wasn't a complete fraud, and most certainly traveled widely, endured much at the hands of the Japanese, did good work and wrote well. But he made up an awful lot of stuff, particularly, it seems, the expertise he claimed on the lives and customs of various African tribes.
Does this make his work as a travel writer any less worthwhile? Probably not - though it serves as a good reminder that all travel writing must, at times, be treated with a pinch of salt!