Misadventures On & Off the Beaten Track

I spent a lot of the nine-hour bus journey from Santa Elena to Guatemala City reading the local paper with increasing alarm. The first seven pages were full of stories about murders lynchings kidnappings car crashes and myriad other ways in which people had died painfully that week; before page eight transitioned seamlessly into the sports section. Death and football it seemed were the winning combination if you wanted to sell newspapers in Guatemala.Whether David is good at travelling depends on your perspective. Over the last two decades his global wanderings have taken him to an array of unusual places and into unplanned and often unorthodox situations most of which he has emerged from more or less unscathed and marginally less naive.This collection of short travel essays brings these stories together into an action-packed and fast-paced travelogue told with humour insight and just a hint of self-reflection. From thought-provoking characters and unforgettable journeys in The Gambia and Indonesia; to bizarre sporting events and dangerous situations in Nicaragua and Bolivia the absorbing tales from travels to thirty-five different countries intrigue and entertain from start to finish.Once the human and animal fighting had concluded a weird cherry was put on top of the bizarre cake that was our evening out in Jilotepec. Into the arena still strewn with feathers and blood tottered two women that many might consider too old and overweight to be strippers but who nonetheless proceeded to give the towns mayor a very public lap dance amongst the remains of twenty dead cockerels.