Bad Lands (Lonely Planet) (Travel Literature)
Bad Lands (Lonely Planet) (Travel Literature) Review
I must own to a slight feeling of trepidation in relation to this book. After all, Lonely Planet basically tends to have a left wing bent and while that is fine I do tire of it when it’s wall-to-wall. But as the stories unfolded in this book I was pleasantly surprised. Not everything is blamed on the great satan. Not every concievable problem of the world is the fault of the dastardly ‘west’. Nope, sometimes the stupidity and insanity of a people is…. their own fault! Once I realised I wasn’t going to get a one sided diatribe I really settled in for a fun ride and devoured this book in the space of a weekend. And then a month later re-read it.
What you have here is Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler relating a journeys to some of the most broken nations on the planet. A whole lot of the usual suspects are lined up here – we have xenophobic and bankrupt Albania seeing enemies on every side when in fact hardly anybody would of noticed if it had sunk into the sea. We have Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and North Korea amongst others. There is even a chapter at the end that includes a bunch of ‘honourable mentions’ of other nations that could of also slotted into the book. And another chapter towards the end is a funny and at the same time deadly serious ‘evil-meter’ to compare the relevant badguys against their own kind (sort of judging them against their peers, lol).
Tony Wheelers travels not only take him to these places but also he uses his history of travel to slot in anecdotes about prior trips he’d done to some of these places in far less hostile or puritanical times. He engages the local people and often finds them less loopy than their governments, particularly where there are educated middle classes in nations where hospitatility is a strong part of the culture such as Iran. Other times you can tell he comes away with the feeling that the populace have been so utterly brainwashed since birth that they probably are just as loopy if not more so than the leadership (North Korea take a bow).
In summation, go out and buy this book. It has laugh out loud moments, touching moments, aspects of history weaved in with anecdotes and personal observation and there is a real feeling that here is a guy who loves travel and wants to engage the people and places he visits while at the same time retaining a healthy dose of cynicism – this guy didn’t have his rose-coloured glasses on when he sat down to write this book. As I say, buy this highly readable and light hearted account and then buy one for a fellow dromomaniac.
Bad Lands (Lonely Planet) (Travel Literature) Overview
In an age of plastic knives on planes, Tony Wheeler can make the extraordinary claim of having visited all the rogue countries currently on newsreaders’ lips. Bad Lands is a witty first-hand account of his travels through some of the most repressive and dangerous regimes in the world: Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Taking into account each country’s attitude to human rights, terrorism and foreign policy, he asks ‘what makes a country truly evil?’ and ‘how bad is really bad?’ – all the while engaging with a colorful cast of locals and hapless tour guides, ruminating on history and debunking popular myths. Written by the founder of Lonely Planet, this fascinating account of life in these closed-off countries will appeal to anyone with an interest in the state of the world today.
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