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Published on October 21, 2007

Bad Lands
By Tony Wheeler
Published by Lonely Planet Publications
Available at Asia Books
Reviewed by James Eckardt
 
The Nation
        
Tony Wheeler is an institution. After a peripatetic childhood, he and his wife Maureen embarked on an overland trip
from England to Australia in 1972 and produced their first book: “Across Asia on the Cheap”. In 1975, they embarked on a six-month motorcycle trip that produced the famous, yellow backpacker’s bible: “Southeast Asia on a Shoestring”.
That book changed the face of tourism in Thailand. The authors recommended, for
example, that travellers no longer take the train straight from Bangkok to Butterworth,
but stop off at the exotic southern beaches of Koh Samui and Phuket. They did, in droves.
(The bible also pronounced that Songkhla had “a rather uninteresting beach” – thus sparing beautiful Samila from future hippie hordes.)
The Wheelers surfed the first backpacker wave into a publishing empire that has turned out 650 guidebooks on 118 countries. When they recently sold their shares in Lonely Planet to BBC World, it made front-page news in Bangkok.
Tony’s latest book is about travelling in the world’s worst places. “Bad Lands” is subtitled “A Tourist on the Axis of Evil”. Three axis-of-evil lands are obvious – Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The other six he picks are Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia.
 This is not a new idea. PJ O’Rourke did it 18 years ago in “Holidays in Hell”, a rousing tour of a dozen terrible countries in the throes of repression and civil war. While Wheeler doesn’t have O’Rourke’s literary chops or savage humour, his own account rises above tour-guide boilerplate through surprisingly vivid descriptions and the emotional reverberations of revisiting places 30 years after his pioneer backpacking days.
On the other hand, his political denunciations are trite, clumsy and strident. We all know that Saudi Arabia is nasty to its women, Libya nasty to its neighbours and North Korea nasty to everyone, but these particular dead horses can be beat can only be beaten so long.
Nonetheless, his personal recollections are often moving. The book opens in Afghanistan, on Chicken Street – Kabul’s
answer to Bangkok’s Khao San Road. Wheeler heads straight for the Mustafa Hotel.
“Maureen and I stayed at the Mustafa back in 1971 and, as soon as the Taliban departed, the family that owned the hotel reopened it, barely skipping a beat,” Wheeler writes. “The threesome – two young guys and a chick (in hippy-era speak)
– tumbling out of the door and hoisting their backpacks on to their shoulders have scarcely missed a beat either: From the
baggy trousers to the billowing kaftans, they’re time-warped straight from the Flower Power era.”
From Kabul, he travels around Afghanistan –Herat, Bamiyan, the Band-I-Amir lakes, the Hazrat Ali shrine, the Panjshir Valley – in a Toyota Hilux with an amiable driver, and generally has a good time.
He has a good time in Albania too, not surprising because this is 15 years after the fall of the quixotic Communist Party of paranoid tyrant Enver Hoxha. From 46
years of total North Korean-style isolation in a landscape studded with bizarre concrete bunkers, Albanians now speak
English and have opened their arms – via cheap family cafes, restaurants and hotels – to the outside tourist world.
He loves Burma, too – the people of course, not the government. On the question of a tourist boycott, he allows others to speak for him. In Prome, he meets Richard Forest, an Australian who’d just come back from a trek in Shan State. He’d previously led adventure tours in Burma until the boycotters persuaded his
company to shut down its Burma operations. Reflecting on the controversy, Forest says:
“Funnily enough back in Australia the vote on whether to withdraw or not depended completely on whether people
had been here or not. If they had visited Burma and made friends here, they certainly didn’t want to abandon them. If they’d never been here, then it was easy
to say no.”
In this rogue’s gallery of nations, the country Wheeler loves most of all is Iran. The people are courteous and friendly, the women liberated beneath their head scarves, the cuisine delicious, the gardens
and fountains and historical architecture breathtaking. He is hit by the realisation that Iran is “a surprisingly sophisticated
country, well aware of the outside world and how they connect to it”.
Recounting countless acts of kindness and welcome, Wheeler sums up: “These people are so energetic, so cheerful, so unlike what the media would have us believe about Iranians.”
The countries where he doesn’t have a good time are Cuba, with its economic
apartheid between tourists and natives, North Korea with its surrealistic tyrant worship, and Saudi Arabia with its misogynistic religious zealots. Even so, he is roused to near-lyricism during a visit to a women’s market in Najran, on the border with Yemen:
“In the shadow of Najran’s enchanted castle is the basket souq, full of baskets and curious stone-turned pots from Yemen,
and close by is the ‘ladies souq’. Special dispensation allows women to work in this market. The goods spill out of the stalls
and across the wide, dusty aisles – baskets of spices, heaps of kitchen utensils, piles of pottery, incense burners, boxes of tribal jewellery, all of it jumbled together with no discernible order, much of it piled up on
boxes and stands that give the whole souq the look of a rolling, colourful hillscape, dotted by the black peaks that are the
women, squatting among their wares.”
The book is handsomely illustrated with colour photographs, but the text is minuscule, nearly painful on the eyes.
You would think that Tony Wheeler, as publisher, could have done something about that.

James Eckardt’s eighth book, “Singapore Girl”, published by Monsoon Books, is on sale at Kinokuniya, Bookazine and Asia Books.