At the end of 2009, I reviewed William Dalrymple's Nine Lives in these pages and, in praising it, moaned on about the death of travel writing. It was the old argument  that in the age of mass travel, people seem to want guide books, not travel literature. But sometimes travel writing is so good it can overcome such malaise and Ox Travels is an example.

For this book proves that the form can still glow with life. Here is the heart of it, the ability of great travel writers to find magic in the most trying of trips  Michael Jacobs, say, enthusing about the mystery of an Air Mali flight to Timbuktu, despite there being several Japanese tourists on board, or Jasper Winn riding a horse along the rubbish-strewn verges of a Mexican superhighway. But the trick the editors have played is to ask the contributors to describe "encounters". And as Michael Palin says in the introduction, that is the key to wandering: "I've relied on human encounters to bring to life the places I've visited."

The result is precious  this book is a small empire of joy. But let's start with a revelation. Who could have credited that there are still so many travel writers and of such brilliance? Any guest at the last remaining travel writing prize, the Dolman, would have seen a cheerful but put-upon little crowd in the back room of London's Arts Club paying for their own dinners. Among them will have been the editors of this volume, Peter Florence, Mark Ellingham and Barnaby Rogerson, whose contact books clearly reach far further.

So, in the space of 432 pages, we travel from Patrick Leigh Fermor's impromptu dance with fishermen and shepherds in a Black Sea cave in 1934 to Sonia Faleiro's recent plane journey in the company of an Indian housemaid escaping Abu Dhabi. Along the way are Sara Wheeler, Dervla Murphy, Dalrymple (with an extract from Nine Lives), Tim Butcher, Jan Morris and Chris Stewart.

Stewart, one of the original members of Genesis and author of Driving Over Lemons, wins the prize for the funniest story. His encounter is with a healer who lives near his Spanish home, whom he visits owing to the reminder of a romantic interlude 25 years before. "To put the matter bluntly," he writes, "I had a horribly inflamed dick."

Having tried various home remedies, including violet oil, he went to see this layer-on of hands. I won't spoil it, but her first words on seeing his culebrina (little serpent) following its violet oil treatment go like this: "[She] peered at it, aghast. It was not looking its best. 'It's a nice colour,' she observed after a bit."

At the other end of the scale is Peter Godwin's "Blood Diamonds", adapted from his book The Fear. In it, Robert Mugabe's men have co-opted nearly all the diamond fields for their own enrichment, so the Zimbabwean author seeks one of the few independent digs and very quickly finds himself in terrible danger, with the men discussing calmly whether they'd be better off killing him or letting him go.

Godwin's story kicks open a door into a world without protection. "They're outlaws, pirates, living this rough, violent life. Somehow, through a series of small, stupid decisions, I've ended up high on this mountain among these desperadoes."

Equally terrifying, and even more upsetting, is Rory MacLean's beautifully constructed story of a life lived in south-east Asia. It's a tale I can say little about without destroying the effect of the gossamer sentences that, layer upon layer, end up strangling the reader, but which begins in eroticism: "She recalled his hands, so large that they had held her as a nest holds a bird."

Or there is beauty, in Sara Wheeler's story of falling in love while travelling through Poland in 1981, a grim land where every official was determined to ruin her journey. The last room available in Warsaw to the traveller was a double but Wheeler was alone and it was illegal for her to rent a double. A man walked through the door of the booking office and they became room-mates, and for some time chaste bed-mates, until at last intimacy broke them down.

There's no doubt, reading this, that travel writing remains for the most part a privileged pursuit. The Windsors keep popping up, as in: "Back in London I was invited for lunch at Buckingham Palace, where I found myself sitting next to Prince Philip." This is from Robin Hanbury-Tenison's lovely "The Orchid Lady". The lunch, in that curiously posh way, leads to him taking a hovercraft up the Orinoco. Or in Rory Stewart's "The Wrestler": "Prince Charles had sent me to Afghanistan because he wanted to help retrain Afghans in traditional crafts." This is preposterous on so many levels. But it's hard to deny, after reading both pieces, that old Etonians get stuff done.

There are enough stories from foreign writers such as Shehan Karunatilaka and Raja Shehadeh to season the effect, if indeed that is needed. Whether it is the writers diving into their pasts for a memory of others or else describing a moment of emotional power that changed them, this book of 36 stories is a diamond, if sometimes a bloody diamond. Certainly, there are flaws, but perhaps only three or four of the stories fail to make the grade and they are easily skipped.

By focusing on encounters, Ox Travels has reinvigorated the form. This is a serious collection; that all proceeds go to Oxfam is pleasing but irrelevant in terms of its quality  it stands on its own. Jan Morris sums up the lessons learned in her contribution, "The Fourth World", when she writes of the key to these encounters: "I have come to think that the identification of kindness is the ultimate achievement." She calls for an International Coalition of Kindness. Why not? Here are stories of humanity.

Just as a side note, if anyone is planning to write a children's book about a put-upon ungulate, I think they should call it Ox Travails.