A Nonsense of Direction: Overland to Everywhere in a Toytown Plastic Car

As epic journeys go, this one frequently didn't. A Nonsense of Direction is the eccentric and farcical story of life in a very slow lane: a rambling 300,000-kilometre drive across continents for no apparent reason. In ever-more ridiculous conversions of Citroën's legendary little 2CV, the author and his partner have hiccupped through some 80 countries, from Afghanistan to catastrophic Sahara crossings, from Bahrain to Belarus, from Liechtenstein to Las Vegas and far beyond.
It began when a naïve young couple with a very different mindset saw their travel daydreams hurtle out of control to obsession. The first plan was simple: drive to India in a tiny plastic-bodied car, thence by tramp steamer to East Africa and down to Cape Town in time for tea. Fourteen months on, then decades and several continents later they were still making every effort to perish, having been stranded, wrecked, robbed and ravaged while reaching the parts most of us could barely identify on a map.
Crossing countries the way others cross streets, their ludicrous itineraries saw them fighting for survival in Saharan sandstorms, high not on drugs but on Tuareg desert tea, marooned between borders in Africa with marriage the only way out, fighting off amorous advances in Turkey, facing a possible hostage situation in Iran, dicing with disease in Afghanistan, struggling for breath in the Himalayan foothills, fleeing rampaging wildlife and machete-wielding mobs before running over a $150-chicken in Africa, dodging deportation in Bahrain, caught smuggling alcohol into Saudi Arabia, refusing to trade sex for safe conduct in Syria, and finding themselves at the wrong end of massed rifles in America's deep south.
Years on they had meandered the equivalent of seven times around the globe, and all in 'vaguely agricultural' two-cylindered cars criticised as inadequate for traversing town, let alone continents. This story has deserts, jungles and mountaintops that say otherwise.
Along the way their tales have enlivened newspaper features and radio and TV interviews. Stirred into one collection, A Nonsense of Direction became a classic globetrotting epic when it first appeared, and this updated and revised edition adds new photography from wildly preposterous journeys now largely impossible in today's troubled geopolitics.
Not so much a travel book as a book about travellers and travelling, it's occasionally even anti-travel, and if you're looking for topographical splendours, words-worthy sunsets and deep psychological insights the bad news is you've come to the wrong book. A book of bits, it's a celebration of all that's fantastic and burlesque about life in a very slow lane. And perhaps most astonishingly, it's all true.
Funny, whimsical and written with a media columnist's sardonic turn of phrase, A Nonsense of Direction is an offbeat and highly entertaining travel-themed comedy of errors celebrating the absurdities as much as the adventure.

Dettagli