How Not to Travel the World: Adventures of a Disaster-Prone Backpacker

As an avid traveller, I was excited to pick this book up, hoping to find homourous, but insightful stories about travel and personal development. However, I'm afraid I haven't found neither. Sure, when you first pick up the book, reading about the author's misadventures, you're drawn in and you feel sympathetic. As the chapters progress, however, and the author encounters one big misadventure followed by an even bigger misadventure, most of which were a result of the author's behaviour or overreation, I started to get bored and annoyed. I hoped to read more about the countries the author travelled through, but instead I was left with nothing but a focus on the annoying fist-person narrator. Other people depicted in the book were either show more very one-dimensional or very negative and unsymphathetic. Only twice did the author bother to talk about her travel experiences that didn't involve a misadventure.

I've thought about abandoning the book altogether, and haven't touched it for months at a time, but continued because I hoped that towards the end some form of reflection and 'lessons learned' would be presented by the author. Apart from a brief interaction with Dave, the author's boyfriend, no such thing happened. In that regard, the title of the book is misleading as there is no guide on 'how not to travel the world'.

The book would've benefitted if the author reflected more on the events she described and provided more insight into the personal develoment she experienced. Instead, all the reader is left with is an annoying first person narrator remeniscing about misadventures which, at least half of the time, were brought upon herself. show less