The Extinction Club, by Robert Twigger; <br></br>Meeting the Invisible Man, by Toby Green; <br></br>Hunting Pirate Heaven, by Kevin Rushby; <br></br>Travels with a Tangerine, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

What are all those intrepid travel writers really seeking ­ and what do they want to escape from? Susan Jeffreys wonders about adventurous young men who flee from women

Girls! Ladies! I've been told that the best way to find yourself a fine man is to hang around the Royal Geographical Society. Tanned and bewildered explorers leave their camels and dog sleds in the car park to wander the Society's corridors, their eyes seeking some distant lost horizon. They are, so my informant told me, easy prey. She may have been wandering a little in her mind. It's a desert out there, girls, and she may have mistaken a mirage for a wadi.

Anyhow, these travelling blokes are, I think, keen on the old male bonding and a bit leery of women. Fat women, particularly on public transport and often as not accompanied by live chickens, seem to be a particular horror of the travelling man. Robert Twigger, in his very funny The Extinction Club, is openly on the run from his lady publisher and guiltily avoiding life with his wife and their new-born child. Through the stacks of the London library, the second-hand book shops of Cairo and wild plains of Woburn, he goes stalking the strange Pere David deer.

Twigger's male bonding is with a grotesque imaginary figure called The Major who, with a party of like-minded figments, lives to wipe out species. Woven in among this is an account of the Boxer Rebellion and the retelling of scurrilous lies concerning the Dowager Empress of China's private parts.

Twigger's constant prevarication about getting down to writing the book he promised his publisher becomes the book itself: "Often I'd glance at my watch and make feeble resolutions about when I'd finish reading this filth and start in on the real research". Brilliantly, at the same time as writing a great travel book, Twigger is also writing a great parody of a travel book.

Toby Green meets up with an old friend, El Hadji, with the aim of Meeting the Invisible Man. It seems, according to Toby, that there are sorcerers in the heart of West Africa that can make a charm that will create invisibility. Others can give you immunity to attacks by knives and bullets. The battlefields of the world are littered with the remains of those who believed in such mumbo jumbo.

Toby Green manages to convince himself that, with the aid of a bit of a black cat's skin and some jiggery-pokery, he achieves temporary invisibility and is briefly invulnerable to stabbing. Perhaps my man-hunting informant was right ­ these travelling chaps are easy prey.

Green and El Hadji, a Senegalese photographer, wrangle their way through West Africa, falling out, falling prey to disease, falling into lethargy, then falling back into step with each other looking for marabouts: keepers of the ancient knowledge. I would say that they had just found some good conjurers, but it's the journey that matters. Green's account of an Africa still suffering from the effects of the slave trade and drifting further away, economically and technologically, from the rest of the world is the book's true power.

Over on the other side of Africa, Kevin Rushby is off with Captain Carvalho and the crew of the Songo, Hunting Pirate Heaven. This is real "We sail with the tide, lads!" stuff, and it is the lot of the fat women in this volume to become violently sea-sick.

Rushby gets it into his head that there was once a pirate's Utopia where old pirates went to "enjoy the Fruits of their Labour, and go to their Graves in Peace". Taking his chances on freighters and dhows and any rusty tub he can hitch a ride on, he tells a tale of the restless, culturally diverse East Coast of Africa. Battered by storms and haunted by strange dreams, he follows a trail of legend and rumour.

Like Twigger, Rushby has a deft wit and, like Green, a deep understanding of his territory. Eventually he comes to the strange island of Anjouan. Seen by outsiders as some sort of Heart of Darkness, it is an island of medinas, Persian graves and ruined palaces.

Gossip of drug dealers and money launderers flies up and down; fragrant ylang-ylang oil and cloves are the main sources of revenue. Anjouan has a piratical past but Rushby presses on. Pirate Heaven is always one island away. These boys just can't settle.

Sultana Taytughli was a big favourite with the Sultan, because he found her every night like a virgin. See what you're up against, girls. Tim Mackintosh-Smith records this gynaecological quirk in Travels with a Tangerine. The Tangerine is Ibn Battutah, who left his native Tangiers in 1325 on a trip to Mecca that took 29 years. Mackintosh-Smith follows in Ibn footsteps, with Ibn's own book of travels ever to hand.

They make, despite the dividing centuries, a good team. Ibn is gossipy, curious and open to experience; Tim scholarly, questioning, slightly detached. This is a journey across time as much as land.

Around the time that Ibn was setting off on his travels, a new porch was added to a church in Mackintosh-Smith's home town of Bristol. It is a strangely eastern piece of work, almost Islamic. At the end of the book, Mackintosh-Smith suggests some daring connections between the world of Christianity and Islam. Throughout his journey, he picks up threads, sometimes weak, sometimes strong, between the 21st and the 14th century.

It is a sweeping, exciting perspective. Sometimes, as he travels from Cairo to the Crimea, across deserts, into assassins' strongholds, it seems that Ibn is just a swish of a robe ahead. In Dhofar, he hears a tale of a dead girl that puts him in mind of Eurydice "and of all the tales that must have wandered around the world before the cultural boundaries began to harden".

These books, with their self-imposed unnecessary yet necessary journeys, full of stories and vivid encounters, take us back to that culturally fluid world. Let them get back onto their camels and sleds, girls. We need them to be out there.