I'm playing it safe in my search for paradise

You have to check the stamps in your passport to remember if it was Crete or Cuba you went to last year

Where to this summer then my proud beauty? Traditionally this is the time of year we pore over the travel supplements and book our annual holiday unless, like Dennis next door, you play safe and rent the same caravan you've been renting on the Isle of Sheppey for the last 42 years.

We were talking holidays, Dennis and I, yesterday when he dropped in to ask if I knew anyone who might like to buy the vintage Macfisheries van he had converted into a luxury motorhome, complete with fully fitted kitchen, shower and sundeck.

Dennis is one of a dying breed of practical men who can repair, rewire and convert anything from a mouse trap to a power station. "But Dennis," I said, "instead of driving to the isle of Sheppey and renting that caravan at Sheerness, why don't you load up your new motor home and try somewhere different. Rye, maybe, or Ramsgate, or even Deal." I forget which side of the Medway Dennis was born so I don't know if he's a Man of Kent or a Kentish Man, but either way it's the only place he values. "The whole point of holidays is to relax, isn't it?" said Dennis, stirring his tea, "and how can you relax in a place you don't know?"

Alas, if only that were true – the unfamiliarity I mean, not the relaxing. Holiday destinations are becoming so homogenised, hotels so identical, shopping malls so interchangeable, food so international that, apart from the souvenir T-shirt, you have to check the stamps in your passport to remember whether it was Crete or Cuba or Croatia you went to last year. All right, I am exaggerating, but it's heading that way. When did you last sit in a bar under a palm tree on a beach anywhere between Barbados and Borneo that was not offering pizzas, burgers and chips. When did you last browse round a hotel shopping arcade anywhere between Oklahoma and Omsk that wasn't selling Nike trainers, Edinburgh rock and the Daily Mail.

I thought I'd cracked it a couple of years ago in a village on a beach between Goa and Kerala. Fresh pineapple and thali was all they had in the bar under the palm tree on the beach. The hotel didn't have a shop, it barely had a bathroom, and the market was strictly home-grown Indian. This is paradise, I thought, and then someone called: "Hello Sue, fancy meeting you here." It was my solicitor from Chorleywood.

The trick, of course, is to get to exotic faraway places before they've been written up in the supplements and overrun by Saga Holidays. I managed to do just that in Mexico about 100 years ago during my two-week semester break at the University of Colorado. American college kids are creatures of habit. If your campus is in the East you go to Florida, if it's in the West you go to Mexico. The trip was suggested by Roger, my campus friend (every foreign student in the States is assigned an official minder), and together we hitch-hiked across the border to Mexico City and then on south to this picturesque little place he knew called Acapulco.

It was a terrible journey. There were no cars and precious few trucks, which meant hours trudging along dusty roads in sweltering heat with no one to talk to but Roger, who was a jerk. Here's how jerky he was. Mexico was, probably still is, one of the poorest countries in the world. Occasionally we'd pass a cave or a pile of boulders with a bit of plastic sheeting on top from which an emaciated peasant would emerge offering something for sale – bananas, a clay pot, a carving. "How much," Roger would say inspecting a carved bowl that would have cost $50 at Bloomingdales. "Ten cents," said the peasant. "I'll give you five if you throw in the bananas," said Roger. Anyway, we got to this fishing village called Acapulco that had, if I remember, a few cheap hotels and a lot of bars and would have been idyllic except for Roger. I ate fish and drank tequila and seriously considered abandoning my thesis on William Faulkner to become a bar girl at El Pajero Azul, but Roger said his campus friend status and privileges would be compromised if I did, so I didn't.

Ten years later I was sent by my news editor to cover an Abta conference in Acapulco and it had more high-rise hotels than Torremolinos. I think I'll play safe like Dennis and stick to Scotland.