The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall

Osborne is a fun, talented, irreverant, witty, informative and insightful writer about the places he decided to visit and report his observations and opinions. I've been to most of those places that he discussed and he gave me a fresh look at some of the locales, and his writing encouraged me to do some revisits. It is not your average travel book - his writing makes you think and re-consider some of your ideas about travel, especially now that we view the world as global, and most destinations are only a few hours away. His postscript/summary was excellent. Buy the book!

I like a writer who's opinionated, and Osborned is certainly that. This is not a guidebook. It's one man's opinion of where he's been, what he's seen, and what he's experienced. For me, that makes fascinating reading. And as an expat living in Bangkok, I must say that his basic take on Bangkok is spot on. It seems just off the cuff but he has a real grasp of the city he calls "Hedonopolis", Bangkok being today what Venice was during the time of young Englishmen taking the Grand Tour. Chai yo!

It's quite obvious that Alain de Botton, author of "The Art of Travel", and Lawrence Osborne are kindred spirits in their expert ability to discern the power of "whateverness" in experiencing locations foreign to one's sensibilities. Osborne's initial premise is to move from civilization to the bowels of the planet in order to show how the world has become less individualistic, that it seems one-size-fits-all tourism has diluted the cultural sense of locations and that the true allure of travel can only be found in the world's most remote pockets. I don't think he entirely proves his thesis, but his biting and entertaining travel tome is quite a treat, as he cuts a sharp swath through the Asian corridor from Dubai to Papua-New Guinea. He is not your typical globe trekker but a traveler who shifts his motivations as the circumstances dictate. Sometimes the author reaches a cathartic point of self-discovery, but more often, he seems to be going back to something instinctual as if his travels satisfy a need simply to roam. His sense of adventure borders on the absurdly humiliating, for example, a high-colonic he has in Bangkok, which brings out the worst nightmares of medical treatment abroad. In Dubai, where he begins his journeys in earnest, he describes in vivid detail "The World", an extravagant project to be designed to recreate the entire globe with three-hundred man-made islands in the Persian Gulf, each up for sale to highest bidders among the world's nations. Bangkok beckons him for the luxury and potential debauchery of its Vegas-like spas, and with the plethora of party-seeking foreign tourists and American-style bars, Bali brings the author a faux-sense of its culture and people seemingly brainwashed to accommodate tourist expectations. He is enamored with the works of legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead and others of her field who have perhaps inadvertently built up the mystique and idyllic state of Bali. However, the best part of the book focuses on the author's transformative moments in Papua, where the somewhat surreal existence of its native population gives him pause. He comes upon an abandoned missionary house in Wanggemalo where he is gawked at by members of the local tribe, the Kombai. A typical ritual of the Kombai is cutting potential sorcerers into four parts, then cooking their brains and viscera on hot stones and eating them. As Osborne delves deeper into the jungle, he is met with even greater peril where he eats pasty-floured grubs and meets natives who know nothing of an outside world. Osborne's cynicism wears away in this section as he develops an honest rapport with the Papuan jungle natives much to his chagrin. It is indeed a grand journey by a most English gentleman.

Since I liked this book so much, I thought I would paste Pico Iyer's amazing review of it in the LA Times... The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall Lawrence Osborne North Point Press: 278 pp., $24 MARGARET MEAD "is a great travel writer precisely because she is not a travel writer," asserts Lawrence Osborne as he draws toward the end of "The Naked Tourist," his account of an inspired experiment in meta-travel, and you half-imagine that he is hoping we will say the same of him. Stumbling from New York to Papua New Guinea, from shopping mall to gated spa, lurching between a grand Kolkata hotel and hellish streets a few yards away, Osborne embarks on a trip to explore, perhaps to prove, the idea that the travel book is dead, if only because travel itself -- in the sense of voyaging to otherness -- is on the brink of expiration; everywhere you go today, you blunder out of the look-alike airport to face the very Holiday Inn, golden arches and Starbucks you've traveled 8,000 miles to escape. Like figures from some ancient myth, we circle the world to flee from ourselves and our familiar lives only to look up and see that we (and our familiar lives) are looking down on us from the screens of the Ginza or Times Square. I happen to disagree with this contention -- a McDonald's in Thailand is to me as Thai as one in Santa Barbara is Santa Barbaran -- and the world to me is as inexhaustible as it ever was, even if the nature of exoticism has changed (to take in Jackson Heights -- or the Mall of America -- as much as Timbuktu). But if anyone could convince me otherwise, through wryness and panache alone, it would be Osborne, who undertakes a grand tour of the 21st century that gains abundantly from the fact that he is not terribly grand and certainly not much of a tourist. The man who is tired of London, as Samuel Johnson might have said (were he in a six-star Bangkok hospital today), should just try the global emporium in Dubai International Airport's "transit consumer" hub. Osborne's premise, in short, is to chronicle a journey through the virtual, simulacrum world that has emerged so quickly that increasingly we can barely tell (or long to tell) one site from another. He decides to sample Planet Tourism, as he calls it, and experience "whateverness" by passing gradually along "the Asian highway" through a series of ever more ersatz places until he arrives at the unadorned treehouses of west Papua, an area kept remote by civil wars and cannibalism. Along the way, he tells us that French playwright Antonin Artaud based his "theater of cruelty" partly upon the intensities of Balinese dance, that boys in Thailand enjoy the legal right to wear skirts to school, and that in Papua pidgin, the pope is known as "Jesus Number One Man." Tourism has become the largest industry in the world today -- the number of international travelers went up almost 30-fold from 1950, when only 25 million people crossed borders, to