Evidently they also decided that my watch wasn’t worth nicking; thank goodness for Timex.Then I realised that the bag containing my passport, camera, lap-top computer and other traveller’s trifles was in the luggage compartment in the lower part of the bus, which was unlocked. Oops.For some reason the villains had not bothered to grab it – either because they felt that to do so would be to draw attention to themselves, or because they could not believe that anyone could be so naive and trusting as to consign all their valuables to somewhere so accessible to the big bad world. I carried the bag on to the bus, and for the three-hour ride to the Czech border I sat clutching it, feeling insecure and a very long way from home.The tourist – especially a confused-looking British one – is the softest of targets for villains across the world, particularly at transport terminals. They prey upon the fact that you are tired, uncertain about where to wait for your bus or train, and wondering whether you remembered your toothbrush when you packed that morning.I fear the three men will have targeted the next muddled foreigner who strayed into Krakow bus station that day, and that their mode of operation is repeated across the world.I was very lucky; no violence was used, and the gang earned nothing for their trouble.

It is miserable to lose possessions, whether they are of practical or personal importance. I temporarily lost something, though: trust in the people with whom I was travelling.Was an accomplice still on the bus, I worried; was the bus driver in on the scam? The joy of travelling evaporated, creating a mist of paranoia that stayed with me across the frontier.That my mood was not altogether normal became apparent at the railway station, when I heard myself asking for a first-class ticket. The people you meet in second class are much more interesting, but for once I did not want to meet them. (And besides, a first-class ticket for the 400- mile length of the Czech Republic costs just pounds 9.)I shall try to avoid similar traps in future, and I hope that you may be more alert to the dangers. But what other perils await the unwary stranger in a strange land? Reveal a scam and help reduce the risks for fellow travellers.. IN SO far as England has a Lourdes, an international place of pilgrimage for the world’s faithful, Haworth must surely be it.

Pilgrims come from all over the globe to this little village, a few miles west of Bradford in West Yorkshire and home of the Bronte family, moved by faith just as they are in the French town. They usually have to undertake long journeys to get there, the environment is garish and commercialised and, as in Lourdes, the surroundings are often more beautiful than the place itself. But most visitors seem to return spiritually strengthened and refreshed. The Brontes, all of them firmly opposed to the Catholics’ “Romish idolatry”, would have hated the parallel. Haworth Parsonage was, from 1820 until his death in 1861, the seat of the Reverend Patrick Bronte, an Irishman who raised himself from destitution to Cambridge, took Anglican orders and ended with a poor parish in the then diocese of York In it he settled with his wife Maria and six children. Within a few years, Maria and two of the five girls had died. Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell were dead by 1855, leaving Patrick a solitary widower looked after by the son-in-law whose marriage to Charlotte he had opposed and whose wedding he had refused to attend, but to whom he was finally reconciled.
Out of the house had shone a dazzling literary light in the form of Charlotte’s four novels – The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette – Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, not to mention their poems.

Few if any family homes can aspire to such a vast output of quality.The approach to the Bronte Parsonage Museum is not an attractive one and the atmosphere at Haworth, a rough and none too salubrious village at the time of the Brontes, does not seem to have changed much since then. The motorist is directed into a scruffy car park; up a litter-strewn path lies the village’s steep main street where two houses out of three tout cups of tea, pizza or garden gnomes with the same aplomb with which hucksters sell rosary beads and aluminium medals at Lourdes.It has been thus since Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte first appeared in 1857 and started a flow of pilgrims to the village. Juliet Barker, in her excellent biography, The Brontes, quotes a newspaper of the time as saying: “The quiet rural inns, where refreshment for man & beast, of a plain but excellent kind, used to be obtainable at a fabulously low price, have raised their tariff to an equality with the most noted hotels in the pathways of tourists.”But step into the parsonage, a stone-built Georgian house of 1778, and the travails of Haworth drop away. It is a handsome residence at the top of the village, across the graveyard from the church and overlooking the moors where the Brontes took their walks. Though altered in 1878 after Patrick’s death, much of it remains as it was; since 1928 it has been in the care of the Bronte Society, which has decorated it lovingly in the style of the period as well as collecting in it a mass of objects that used to belong to the family. On the right of the entrance hall is Patrick’s tiny study, containing the small piano – played mainly by Emily; on the left is the dining-room where his daughters did most of their writing, and where Emily died Upstairs are the bedrooms and Branwell’s painter’s studio.