Alain de Boton / The Independent Online Edition

The highlight of my holidays in 2004 involved sitting on a giant inflatable banana that was being pulled at high speed by a motorboat driven by a maniac off the coast of Torremolinos. I was clinging tightly to the girl in front of me, and all eight of us on the yellow rubber tube were screaming as if we'd just seen a great white shark.

The only thing that made this aquatic jape slightly unusual was that on the shore, a camera crew had its lens trained on us and was, via walkie-talkie, encouraging the driver of the motorboat to make violent turns that would throw us all into the chilly sea and release yet more hysterical wailing (and hopefully, elicit laughter from the viewers).

After years of writing books alone in my ivory and cork-lined study, unmolested by modern civilisation, reluctant to put on bathing shorts and suspicious of all water sports, I had finally stepped out of the house to make a documentary on travel for Channel 4.

A couple of years before I'd published a book about going travelling. The Art of Travel was a fairly caustic take on the subject, best summed up by the book's epigraph from that famous homebody, the 17th-century French philosopher Pascal: "All of man's unhappiness comes from his inability to stay alone in his room." The book deliberately set out to puncture some of the pretensions put about by the travel industry and the holiday shows that dominate TV schedules. I believed that going travelling was a subject worthy of philosophical reflection. I was keen to debunk the idea that moving from one place to another was an instant route to happiness.

Fortunately, none of this frightened the intrepid commissioning editors at Channel 4, who invited me to go on a number of short holidays in search of the meaning and purpose of travel. So we set off for Torremolinos on the Spanish Costa del Sol. I'd never been there before, but I was pleasantly surprised. The hotel I stayed in was clean and bright, the food was good, the nightlife interesting. The only problem - and this is key difficulty in all journeys - is that I realised I'd taken myself with me on my holiday: the old familiar me (with all the same anxieties and regrets) had ended up spoiling what I'd come to see.

Alain de Botton's 'The Art of Travel' will be shown on Channel 4 at 7pm tomorrow, 2 January. The author's website can be found at www.alaindebotton.com

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