There is a kind of traveller who arrives everywhere a little too late. The (0) CELEBRATED quarter has been ruined by its own celebrity; the restaurant is now overrun; the unspoilt village has been for over a decade by the guidebooks that once praised its isolation. To travel in this fashion is to be permanently of a better version of the place that existed before one's arrival — a version one knows only through the testimony of earlier travellers whose descriptions the present reality cannot up to. The late traveller is therefore an elegist by default, reading the streets as palimpsests in which the half-effaced layer of the past shows through the glossy of the present. Some treat this as a melancholy to be , and confine themselves to destinations so obscure that no predecessor has yet despoiled them. Others, more philosophical, that all cities are, in the traveller's eyes, always already past — that the moment one has heard of a place, it has already begun its slow slide into the condition of having-been. These travellers make their peace with belatedness, and find in it a kind of that is not available to the first arrivals, for whom a place is always, and only, itself.