His personal encounters with the dark side of travel carry the book, which is more memoir than expose. He has suffered greatly, but pain only makes him laugh, even when it's a dense carpet of ants crawling up his legs in a squalid Brazilian hotel room.
Along the way Thompson has accumulated, if not wisdom, some useful tips. It is worth remembering that in the US "spicy" means "not spicy." In Thailand the word means "it's going to taste like someone shoving a blowtorch down your throat for the next 25 minutes." No white man, he cautions "should ever wear a sarong, not even in private."
In a chapter on the workings of the travel industry Thompson strongly recommends lying whenever possible to gain extra discounts on cars, hotel rooms and air tickets. No one knows that you are not the regional sales director for Microsoft. If your batteries die mid-flight, rubbing them briskly on your leg to generate static electricity can prolong their life for as much as an hour or two.
"This also works in cheap hotels where they never change the batteries in the remote," he writes.
A cloud of guilt envelops Thompson as he writes, conscious that he and his travel-porn cohorts have strip mined the earth of its most precious resource: pleasant, undiscovered destinations.
"We venerate what we destroy," he writes. "But first we destroy." By the time he got around to returning to Eastern Europe, travel journalism had done its work, specifically television travelers like Rick Steves and the Lonely Planet guides, two of Thompson's favorite targets.
"Every description sounded as if it had been lifted from a feminine-hygiene-spray commercial," he writes of one of Steves' Eastern European video tours. "Seas glistened. Cities sparkled. Hungary was a 'goulash' of influences. And, of course, the Croatian city of Split was the usual fascinating blend of ancient and modern."
How about South America instead? "Second only to the Himalayas for mountain drama, the turbulent beauty of the Andes" — but wait, could this description possibly be written by none other than Thompson? As he duly notes, travel journalists are a little like alcoholics, doomed to repeat the same story in the same words. Backsliding, apparently, is always a danger.
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