Where to Next, Tintin?

The Guardian travels the world with Tintin as more and more modern day fans follow in his fictional footsteps for vacations.

From the piece...

So I found myself looking up at the famous first view that travellers get of the Treasury at Petra in Jordan – framed between the walls of the ceremonial Siq passage - holding a grubby copy of Hergé's book The Red Sea Sharks before me. The pink pillars, dusty sand, horses and Arabs in keffiyehs, their vivid colours flattened and bleached by the heat, could have leapt straight out of the page.

Thousands of tourists visit Petra every week, but this summer I was part of the first small group of adventurers to arrive at the rose-red city in the footsteps of Tintin, led by one of the world's leading Tintinologists, Michael Farr.

For Michael – who, dressed in beige linen suit and explorer's hat, looks to have stepped from that golden era of travel – this is clearly part of the delight. A natural raconteur, he explains that Tintin creator Hergé's drawings were astonishingly accurate, from his rendering of landscapes such as the Middle Eastern desert and local costumes, down to the accuracy of Egyptian hieroglyphs painted on a tomb or the Chinese lettering on a street banner. When fans of the comics see images of the real thing they perhaps cannot help but be reminded of the books in which they first saw them.