|
menu
 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
|
|
THE GAP YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Backpackers and backpacking
The Independent, June 1999
SO, a two-year study by the good folk of the Roehampton Institute has yielded the conclusion that quite a lot of young backpackers are rather more interested in getting themselves suntanned, drunk and laid than they are in exploring the cultures of the places to which they have travelled. Well, it’s a thought. However, while we keenly await the Roehampton Institute’s findings on the hardness and greyness of concrete and the religious leanings of Pope John Paul II, spare a thought for the rucksack-encumbered hordes. This year of all years, they will find themselves under increasing scrutiny, as the film of Alex Garland’s cult road novel “The Beach” is released, and Leonardo DiCaprio personifies the traveller’s quixotic quest for the bona fide, unspoiled foreign experience. Their motives will be impugned, their desirability questioned and their arriviste ethnic jewellery jeered at. The last of these aside, they really don’t deserve it.
The Roehampton Institute suggests that backpackers, far from being intrepid travellers seeking genuine knowledge beyond the gloss of package holiday brochures, are no less destructive and parasitic than the worst bunch of marauding Club 18-30 hooligans on the razzle. However, their study was based on the behaviour of the 50,000 foreign backpackers who, each year, visit the Egyptian resort of Dahab. This is something like judging the entire nation of Germany on the comportment of those of its population who passed through Poland in the 1940s. Dahab - like Goa, Phuket, Marrakesh and Chiang Mai - is legendary as a sink of marijuana cafes, western theme bars, tatty nightclubs and rapacious souvenir merchants flogging “authentic” “Arabian” carpets they ordered from Pakistani sweatshops to stupid, stoned, sandal-shod students from all points Surrey to Sydney. This is why I, and thousands more like me, wouldn’t go near the place without being dragged by the ankles behind a hundred charging camels. It’s not because we think Dahab has been ruined, or defiled, or contaminated by the alien influx. It just sounds like a dump.
For yea, I have backpacked. I have stood on busy street corners, squinting cluelessly into the middle distance as I try to reconcile the cityscape with my Lonely Planet map. I have held up queues of irritated locals in shops while I tried to calculate exchange rates of silly third world currencies with too many zeroes on their notes. I have probably even whacked you in the ribs with my rucksack frame on a crowded tube. I’m kind of sorry about that, but I refuse to apologise for the rest. Aside from the struggles with Bulgarian railway timetables, Romanian food, Polish plumbing and the virulent strain of amoebic dysentery that lurks in Syria’s Orontes river, I’ve had a terrific time, learnt a lot, met dozens of interesting, amusing or downright dangerous people (the demented Jordanian bus driver who spent the trip firing plastic darts at his weary passengers from a toy pistol is an especially cherished memory), and do not believe that I had a significantly adverse impact on anything other than my credit card and digestive system. Yes, there are people who go overseas to get drunk, make noise and essay clumsy sexual advances at anyone passing, but would you really prefer they did it at home, where you live?
In 1990, after leaving my native Australia, I spent five months travelling around Italy and Eastern Europe. In 1993, I spent another six hauling overland from Helsinki to Tel Aviv. On neither expedition would I have done much to please the Roehampton institute: the only suntan I got was the incidental sort that comes naturally of a summer in Jordan and Israel, I consumed no substance more mind-altering than Turkish raki, and as for the notion that the backpacker circuit is a bountiful smorgasbord of semi-anonymous sex, I can only surmise that I was staying in the wrong hostels (there was a place in the pretty Polish town of Torun which rented both rooms and members of staff by the hour, but they were off-puttingly cracked, mildew-infested and damp - the rooms, on the other hand, were quite pleasant).
The Roehampton Institute’s report goes on to suggest that today’s backpackers are as removed from the real life of the places they are visiting as the most cossetted package holidaymaker. While this is difficult to beat as a blinding statement of the incredibly obvious, it is possibly the only part of their research that merits any added stress. I still meet an extraordinary number of travellers who think that their weeks or months abroad are earning them a native’s understanding of their surroundings. This is a tempting delusion, but delusion it is: you can only relate to places the way they relate to you, and if you’re a tourist you’re a tourist, whether you’re eating egg and chips and watching an England game on cable television in a Turkish resort, or picking off leeches and dining on smoked rat as you trek up the Siang river in far north-eastern India to meet remote hill villagers who’ve never seen white people before (I know, I’ve done both). Paradoxically, I have never met anyone whose time in a foreign place is measured in years or decades who claims to be any sort of authority on it: if there’s one thing the smart traveller should realise, it’s that they’re not going to find any answers. Though they may, if they’re clever, come back with some better questions.
Backpacking has no moral height over any other variety of tourism - in fact, the only truly objectionable thing about it is the number of its practitioners who think it has - but it does have some definite advantages. Especially when undertaken solo, it is a more extreme experience which, while it probably won’t teach you any more about your surroundings than a conducted tour, will teach you a great deal more about yourself. On a coach, as at home, there is always someone we can call, someone who will sort a problem out. At a railway siding on the Serbian border when we’ve caught the wrong train from Sofia, in a deserted Syrian town where the only likely-looking accomodation is a glowering 15th-century basalt castle, in a dusty two-goat Kurdish village where a dicey moussaka has blinded you with dehydrated agony, it’s up to you. This makes the ride back to Sofia in a coal locomotive, a castle to yourself for two quid a night, or the location of a sympathetic English-speaking doctor with a stockpile of Spectator back issues all the more rewarding.
And if, after weeks on the road with no conversation but for the rather unsatisfactory kind you can find yourself having with your short-wave radio, a backpacker arriving in a largish and well-touristed town finds themselves drawn to the Technicolour Yawn bar at the Boxing Kangaroo youth hostel, it’s forgiveable, if not immediately understandable. They’re a long way from home, doubtless somewhat tired of their own company, and a fluent conversation about visa loopholes and hiking boots will seem an improvement on interminable stuttering, pidgin exchanges about religion, politics and sport. Some might even be tempted to stay a while - even long enough to be studied by humourless academics who should get real jobs. The trick, as ever, is to keep on moving.
PRINT PAGE | BACK TO TOP
|
|
