Product Description
A collection of the best travel writing from National Geographic Traveller columnist and GrumpyTraveller.com author David Whitley. Featuring 70 carefully selected stories from David's career as a travel writer, the tales stretch from New York to New Zealand, and Paris to Palau.
Designed as a selection of short stories to dip in and out of, Hardly Paradise ditches the glossy sheen of the travel brochures. Sometimes funny, sometimes bleak and sometimes downright intriguing, this is a collection of personal experiences, bizarre oddities and fascinating human dramas picked up in unlikely corners of the world.
It swings from watching a car crash unfold at a Las Vegas roulette table to humiliation in an Italian spa. Tales of ineptitude include falling out a canoe into an alligator-infested river, being taken in by a Malaysian conman and getting locked into a wildlife refuge.
Not all of the stories are David's, however. There are global tales of heartbreak and loss collected by a Croatian couple whose relationship had run its course; there's the erotic art obsession of a septuagenarian grandmother; there's the case of a Pacific Islander who has had to find work because his wife has embraced capitalism.
The mood swings from joyous geriatric karaoke to seedy Thai romance; from signs of hope in a land devastated by a volcano to hotels that just want to annoy their guests.
These anti-postcards come from five continents - from Singapore to Sydney, Lesotho to Las Vegas, Berlin to Brooklyn and Vancouver to the Vatican. They rarely wish you were here, but they do shine a light on what you might be missing. You'll laugh, you'll fight back tears, you'll find yourself saying: "I never knew that". And you'll never trust a monkey again...
Designed as a selection of short stories to dip in and out of, Hardly Paradise ditches the glossy sheen of the travel brochures. Sometimes funny, sometimes bleak and sometimes downright intriguing, this is a collection of personal experiences, bizarre oddities and fascinating human dramas picked up in unlikely corners of the world.
It swings from watching a car crash unfold at a Las Vegas roulette table to humiliation in an Italian spa. Tales of ineptitude include falling out a canoe into an alligator-infested river, being taken in by a Malaysian conman and getting locked into a wildlife refuge.
Not all of the stories are David's, however. There are global tales of heartbreak and loss collected by a Croatian couple whose relationship had run its course; there's the erotic art obsession of a septuagenarian grandmother; there's the case of a Pacific Islander who has had to find work because his wife has embraced capitalism.
The mood swings from joyous geriatric karaoke to seedy Thai romance; from signs of hope in a land devastated by a volcano to hotels that just want to annoy their guests.
These anti-postcards come from five continents - from Singapore to Sydney, Lesotho to Las Vegas, Berlin to Brooklyn and Vancouver to the Vatican. They rarely wish you were here, but they do shine a light on what you might be missing. You'll laugh, you'll fight back tears, you'll find yourself saying: "I never knew that". And you'll never trust a monkey again...
