Holidays in Hell

“The earth’s travel destinations are cram-full of littering Venezuelans, peevish Swiss, Norwegian back-packers yodelling in restaurant booths, Saudi Arabian businessmen getting their dresses caught in revolving doors and Bengali remittance men in their 25th year of graduate school pestering fat blonde Belgian au pair girls…”

Sadly disenchanted with the traditional tourist trail, P. J. O’Rourke has chosen to visit those destinations that feature all too rarely in the travel brochures, largely because they are in a perpetual state of war, revolution or shortage of everything from hot dogs to toilet paper.

Hence Holidays in Hell, a package tour of traveller’s tales from places as appealing to the average sun ‘n’ sensation seeker as the inner circles of Dante’s Inferno.

From Europe in the protest-packed weeks after the F-111s made that night flight to Tripoli and Chernobyl did its bit for European health and fitness, America’s master merrymaker set out for Lebanon (where water-skiers don’t worry about the snipers because their aim’s so bad) and Poland (where a small ad offered to exchange a two-bedroom apartment in Warsaw for a sleeping bag in New York).

He went to sea (aboard the press boat Sea Chunder) to watch the America’s Cup, spent Christmas in El Salvador, and managed to bring back front-ish line reports from such newsworthy landfalls as the Sandinistas’ Managua, the post-Marcos Philippines, Korea, South Africa and Northern Ireland.

Setting out to prove that a real patriot can find his fun at home as well as abroad, he reports back on the 350th anniversary celebrations at Harvard (*the home of American ideas… well, somebody has to take the blame for them”) and a weekend in North Carolina with the born-again Christians (“we came to scoff but went away converted… to Satanism”).

Well, what sort of a travel book did you expect from P. J. O’Rourke, the man hailed by The Wall Street Journal as ‘the funniest writer in America”?