Santo Cilauro

One of the funniest books ever. Seriously. For those who don't know, Molvania is a small, former Soviet republic in eastern Europe. Or so the authors would have you think. The book is a spot-on spoof of a travel guide to this country, with detailed examinations of the people and culture as well as the usual tour-book examinations of where to stay and eat and what to do. The humor is very dry, but laugh-out-loud funny. (Some of my favorite examples include the fact that the Molvanian language show more has been slow to catch on outside of the country due to the insistence on the use of the triple negative [e.g., "Is it not that the water is not not unsafe to drink?" or the hotel where the staff can provide virtually everything from clean linen to a teenage girl or the public park in the downtown of a "major" city that is underutilized, perhaps because of the large minefield in the middle.) Absolutely hysterical and well-worth reading (even if you only pick it up and read random bits). show less

The third entry in the Jetlag series of parodies of travel guides. To be honest I would have thought the authors would have run out of jokes by now but there's still some quite funny moments scattered throughout "San Sombrero", especially for those who spent/are spending their life travelling through the developing world.

I particularly liked the line about the San Sombrero man who is the only Nobel Peace Prize laureate to be charged with war crimes, thinking at the time how unlikely that show more would be, but Aung San Suu Kyi may yet equal his feat. show less

for those of us hard core ex-pats in Asia, this is a gem! The "travel authors" take the mickey out of every foible of travelling in all Asian countries, from "Thong-On Beach" in a country sounding suspiciously like Thailand, and "BumpadaBumpa" which is probably Bankgkok. No matter how many times you dive into the book, you keep finding new and very clever bits, from the "Most Commonly Used Phrases" ("What is that smell?") to travellers' tips - even the symbols used in the map key are a show more stitch. And this is just one in a series! Read "Molvania - A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry!" show less

Reading this travel guide parody is equivalent to lying on the couch on a Sunday afternoon watching the dumbest television show in creation, but unable to muster the energy to turn the show off. I was lying on the couch reading, and perhaps it would have taken less energy if I just shut the book and closed my eyes, but I just HAD to keep reading even if I rarely broke a smile, much less laughed at the tired repetitions of the same jokes about a country really too awful to consider visiting.