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The other day, feeling a little bored, I dipped into my copies of The Garden of Eden, A Moveable Feast and, The Sun Also Rises, all of them by Ernest Hemingway. Although famous as a novelist, it struck me what a fine travel writer Hemingway was.

He did what few other travel writers are able to do, which is to describe the texture of things, telling us about the steely taste of a burgundy wine, the metallic taste of an oyster and one feels this is as important as the people, the landscape, the broad narrative he creates. His cities, his landscapes come alive in the most uncanny way. No wonder he wrote somewhere that a book written from imagination is more real than the reality. I have misquoted that terribly, but it was something like that.

The success of his writing, and that of his contemporaries living in Europe in the 1920's, had an unfortunate side-effect. Looking back, it seems inevitable. The dispatches sent back to America especially on the South of France by these writers drew a deluge of tourists after the war when Americans, wallets bulging with their all-powerful dollars arrived like conquistadores from across the water to conquer a France where the franc was almost valueless by comparison. From Paris they travelled south in search of the mythical landscape described by Hemingway and Scot Fitzgerald. These tourists were in a hurry and couldn't linger forever over lunch, they had to press on: "Garcon, our bill … hurry!"

In their wake, tiny country hotels and inns began to make way for towering hotels; traditional hospitality, almost overnight, became an industry as service became slick, professional and impersonal. The custodians of French culture looked on with mounting concern as they saw traditional life change irrevocably.

It is for this reason that reading Hemingway's descriptions of the South of France and of Spain invites intense nostalgia. Turning page after page, we realize that it is a world lost forever. It does not exist any longer, if it ever did. Good writers are somehow able to create a version of their world that is more concentrated, selective and more intense than the original. Shakespeare created England as Hemingway created Spain and France, Marques Colombia and Turgenev the Russian countryside.

Friends of mine recently went on a week-long holiday through the Little Karoo (lovely word, isn't it? - 'Karoo'). They shared with me their experience of dining in the little guest houses where they stayed, and told me how they travelled fearfully in an intense mist down the breathtaking Swartberg Pass, stopped for lunch at Jemima in Oudtshoorn, slept over on a farm where, the next morning, they enjoyed a farmer's breakfast at the crack of dawn. They could not stop singing the praises of every little establishment and I could not resist asking them how the Karoo countryside compared with Provence, which they visit every year.

"As good, if not better - without the pomp," came the reply.

It's a reply that pleased me. I realize that these little towns of the Karoo are as yet undiscovered; they have not yet become self-conscious. In a way, our tourist industry is a mere ten years old and most of the countryside remains unspoilt and there is something wonderful to be discovered still. Until, perhaps inevitably, a fine writer comes along and transforms it into the mythical and places it forever out of our reach, and in its wake, a crass commercialism replaces what was once charming and authentic.

Reading Hemingway's descriptions of the South of France and of Spain invites intense nostalgia. Turning page after page, we realize that it is a world lost forever. It does not exist any longer, if it ever did. Good writers are somehow able to create a version of their world that is more concentrated, selective and more intense than the original. You could say our own tourist industry is only ten years' old. The landscape of the Little Karoo with its little towns and guest houses has not yet been recreated in literature the way the French provinces have. When it does, it might change forever.