Gullible Travels
★★★★★
“I loved this book. Entertaining, brave and a good description of how it is to experience life as a low budget traveller in foreign lands.”
— Review by Edward Williams
“Like grey-faced foreign office officials around the world I am currently – eternally – negotiating peace (or war). My family is planning a holiday. Summits have been held, late night phone calls made, and finally, having worked around the clock or so it felt, success has been claimed: an agreement has been reached on the destination. Now, as they say, the real work must begin. Flights, shuttles, travel times, must-sees, tours, hotels, costs; it all needs to be researched, organised, proposed, discussed and agreed upon; it all needs to be itinerarised. And soon: we aim to leave in a mere eight months.
None of these aspects are paid much attention by Barnaby Attwell in his book Gullible Travels. Of course all non-fiction writers leave information out – travel writing often omits most of this common chunk of what travel actually entails – even if it were desirable to include all the boring and irrelevant details of life into a book it would be impossible. But in this collection of stories, it begins to seem less likely he was making any attempt, conscious or otherwise, to avoid the details of preparation, formalities such as getting immunised before travelling to SE Asia, than that such preparations may never have occurred. Indeed, he catches dengue fever – without any insurance – in Indonesia during its 1998 revolution (distracted by a prostitute who had stolen his video camera; this event only became apparent to him after nearly all other foreigners had fled, the airport had closed and Jakarta smouldered around him).
Not worrying about consequences seems to be Attwell’s approach to decision-making in general and through this collection of stories we get to see how this plays out in Europe, the US, Asia, North Africa and Australasia. Every page is soaked in fear, embarrassment or loneliness – he spends a lot of time looking for sex and drugs – and yet Gullible Travels is an inspirational book: few people collect as many great stories in their lives.”
— Review by Chris Chapman
Gullible Travels is a collection of short travel stories from the 1990s, just before mobile phones and the internet changed the world forever, and when getting lost really meant getting lost. The stories featured include travels in North Africa, New Orleans, South East Asia and Australasia.