Travel: Do people going abroad ever have proper adventures?

`Would Enid Blyton have approved of the twins' adventure?'

Talking about Enid Blyton (see the front page of this section) has made me wonder whether people really do have adventures of the sort she wrote about.

What for example really happens when a gang of four cousins and a dog stumble across a gang of smugglers while picnicking in Wales? Do they set about stalking them for a week, before locking them into a cave with a giant boulder? Or do they scuttle home with their pockets full of cocaine?

The case of the New Zealand twins who were found living rough in Australia last week certainly looks like an adventure of some sort. I'm wondering whether it could pass the Enid Blyton test.

These teenagers were on the wrong side of pubescence, being 18 rather than 13, and they would probably not take kindly to being referred to as children. But look at what they did.

They decided to stow away in a Malaysian container ship to escape some domestic unpleasantness. Was this really the easiest way of running away from home? Or just the most adventurous? Presumably they had to sneak up the gang-plank at the dead of night and hide in a life-boat. Survival would have involved creeping round the galley to snatch provisions whenever the crew's back were turned.

Having suffered the inevitable fate of all stowaways - being caught and confined to a locked cabin - our plucky twins then took it in their heads to escape. How does one escape from a container ship? Simple: jump.

Never mind the fact that jumping from such a ship into the sea is the equivalent of jumping on to land from the roof of a three storey building. Just think of the nerve it takes to jump into the sea when the steaming shore is 20 miles away. From sea-level it would have been invisible. The fact that this particular bit of sea off the coast of Queensland was infested with sharks, crocodiles and deadly jellyfish was almost incidental.

Having survived the plunge, the two then swam defiantly for land, finally washing up somewhere on the Cape York peninsula.

Even after all this though, the real adventure was only beginning. Stranded on uncharted terrain, they spent the next 19 days living on a diet of raw shellfish. Only when aborigines discovered them and led them to the nearest town, did their story emerge.

It was an adventure all right, by most people's standards. The question is whether it really had the essence of Enid Blyton about it. Was there for example anything heroic about these girls? Did they leave a trail of stubble-faced villains locked up in undersea caves? Did they make friends with animals? Did they smile sunny smiles as they chomped on their shellfish? In short, did they make a fundamental contribution to the stock of good in the world?

The whole story is yet to emerge but none of this seems likely. When they were discovered they were described as "downhearted" which I think can probably be read as "pissed off". Their mood was not triumphant. Given that they were wanted in New Zealand for minor offences, it actually seems that, far from pursuing evil, they were running away from the law.

Would Enid Blyton have approved? It is hard to imagine that she could have controlled her fury, especially at the thought of all the moral credit of the story falling to the aborigines. But then this is the 1990s. It seems that not only race relations, but also the nature of adventure has changed in subtle ways.

If Enid Blyton had been writing today, I suspect the challenge she would have set her adventurers would be to approach death as near as they dared, without sustaining damage. Never mind being side-tracked by considerations such as the need to defeat criminals along the way.