With chapter titles ranging from Istanbul, Turkey: "How could you be so stupid?" to Tiraspol, Transnistria: "It's like the Truman Show fucked The Twilight Zone", the first in the series of Weird Travel books by Adam Fletcher is a funny, informative and entertaining read.
Arriving with his Berliner girlfriend into Istanbul at the height of the civil unrest as fallout from the Gezi Park Protests, Fletcher has an ability to combine the surreal - you've just turned up for your vacation only to be teargasses - with the human side - you seek shelter in a bar with other travellers to digest what is happening - and always has that air of wit and sarcasm (that I enjoy far too much).
His experience with said tear gas seems to be the trigger that sets him on a journey to visit places that most people wouldn't want to go to - some dangerous, some far flung, and some hotly disputed. From a 40-hour bus journey that almost breaks his and his girlfriend's relationship in China, to trying to access (by boat) one of the newest countries in the world - namely, Liberland, a micronation claiming an uninhabited parcel of disputed land between Croatia and Serbia - you will struggle to put this book down. Each chapter in itself offers so much and it almost reads as a set of short stories, with the only consistency being Fletcher's often comical attempts to converse with locals.
As soon as I finished this book, I went straight online and ordered the second in his series of Weird Travel, which is almost as good as the first (Don't Come Back), but not quite.
Comments