The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall [Hardcover]

Lawrence Osborne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006

From the theme resorts of Dubai to the jungles of Papua New Guinea, a disturbing but hilarious tour of the exotic east—and of the tour itself

 

Sick of producing the bromides of the professional travel writer, Lawrence Osborne decided to explore the psychological underpinnings of tourism itself. He took a six-month journey across the so-called Asian Highway—a swathe of Southeast Asia that, since the Victorian era, has seduced generations of tourists with its manufactured dreams of the exotic Orient. And like many a lost soul on this same route, he ended up in the harrowing forests of Papua, searching for a people who have never seen a tourist.

 

What, Osborne asks, are millions of affluent itinerants looking for in these endless resorts, hotels, cosmetic-surgery packages, spas, spiritual retreats, sex clubs, and “back to nature” trips? What does tourism, the world’s single largest business, have to sell? A travelogue into that heart of darkness known as the Western
mind, The Naked Tourist is the most mordant and ambitious work to date from the author of The Accidental Connoisseu r, praised by The New York Times Book Review as “smart, generous, perceptive, funny, sensible.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When a neighborhood is described as 'seedy' by some Lonely Planet prude," Osborne (The Accidental Connoisseur) declares, "I immediately head there." But even the boldest of travel writers can become jaded by visiting locales that have recreated themselves in romanticized "exotic" images, making one feel one is merely playing the role of a tourist rather than seeing anything new. So Osborne sets out to visit a tribe in Papua New Guinea that's had barely any contact with Westerners. Instead of heading straight for the jungle, however, he embarks on a lengthy trek along "the Asian Highway," clusters of tourist attractions that lead him through Dubai on to Calcutta and Bangkok. The story is strongest when Osborne drops the world-weary tone and simply engages with his surroundings: a hellish drive through Indian jungles, for example, or a whirlwind tour of Thailand's inexpensive medical centers. Once he fully abandons his comfort zone and plunges into the remote swamps of Papua, his encounter with the Kombai tribe is anticlimactic. Although he writes of the "shimmering hysteria" that came with stripping away nearly all vestiges of modern civilization, Osborne's account never fully embraces that vertigo, remaining just another well-crafted travel story. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Today's tourist, in Osborne's estimation, has too much money, undergoes too little education, possesses even less knowledge, and lacks completely the intellectual curiosity that makes travel compelling and rewarding. Osborne sets out across the globe, working his way east from Dubai through India and Thailand into remote areas of Papua New Guinea. In Dubai he surveys a money-obsessed society determined to remake a desert seafront into a sort of Islamic Disneyworld with manufactured sandy beaches on artificial islands. He finds Calcutta a ruined, failed city, still beset with Marxist idols. Bangkok caters boldly to carnal pleasures, and a trip to the hospital for some vaccinations uncovers a haven for sex-reassignment surgery. Less-radical changes may be had at Thai spas. The exotic culture of Bali attracts Osborne, but his objective remains Papua New Guinea, where too much cleanliness can be dangerous since the locals confuse soap perfumes with evil spirits. Nevertheless, in this South Pacific remoteness, Osborne finally attains his travel goal of reaching a place where no one has yet seen tourists. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865477094
• ISBN-13: 978-0865477094
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,568,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lawrence Osborne was born in England and lives in New York City. A widely published and widely traveled journalist, he is the author most recently of "The Accidental Connoisseur," "The Naked Tourist" and "Bangkok Days," all published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. He has lived a nomadic life in Mexico, Italy, France, Morocco, Cambodia and Thailand, places that he draws on in his fiction and non-fiction. His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Tin House, Bidoun and Fiction, while his upcoming novel "The Forgiven" will be published by Crown in 2012.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hoo Hum, August 28, 2006

By 

Miran Ali "I don't like anonymous reviewers" (Dhaka, Bangladesh) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall (Hardcover)

Osborne travels from Dubai, to Calcutta, the Andamans, Bangkok, Bali and finally Papua New Gineau. Well I've been to all of these places except the Andamans and PNG. Frankly I found Osboborne to be a bit dull, not very funny and not really anything new or insightful about his travels. I enjoyed his history of tourism though.
Let's say this is a travel magazine article quality book. I've read better. There was also atleast one factual error, where he refers to the 1973 war in Bangladesh. Methinks he meant 1971. Careless and a sure sign of bad editing. He also claimed to have stumbled accross the Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. To claim to have stumbled accross such a hospital is to imply that he did no research at all prior to setting off. That just doesn't ring true.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Rather Crotchety Traveler Mired Most Entertainingly in Self-Discovery, June 19, 2006

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall (Hardcover)

It's quite obvious that Alain de Botton, author of "The Art of Travel", and Lawrence Osborne are kindred spirits in their expert ability to discern the power of "whateverness" in experiencing locations foreign to one's sensibilities. Osborne's initial premise is to move from civilization to the bowels of the planet in order to show how the world has become less individualistic, that it seems one-size-fits-all tourism has diluted the cultural sense of locations and that the true allure of travel can only be found in the world's most remote pockets. I don't think he entirely proves his thesis, but his biting and entertaining travel tome is quite a treat, as he cuts a sharp swath through the Asian corridor from Dubai to Papua-New Guinea.

He is not your typical globe trekker but a traveler who shifts his motivations as the circumstances dictate. Sometimes the author reaches a cathartic point of self-discovery, but more often, he seems to be going back to something instinctual as if his travels satisfy a need simply to roam. His sense of adventure borders on the absurdly humiliating, for example, a high-colonic he has in Bangkok, which brings out the worst nightmares of medical treatment abroad. In Dubai, where he begins his journeys in earnest, he describes in vivid detail "The World", an extravagant project to be designed to recreate the entire globe with three-hundred man-made islands in the Persian Gulf, each up for sale to highest bidders among the world's nations. Bangkok beckons him for the luxury and potential debauchery of its Vegas-like spas, and with the plethora of party-seeking foreign tourists and American-style bars, Bali brings the author a faux-sense of its culture and people seemingly brainwashed to accommodate tourist expectations. He is enamored with the works of legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead and others of her field who have perhaps inadvertently built up the mystique and idyllic state of Bali.

However, the best part of the book focuses on the author's transformative moments in Papua, where the somewhat surreal existence of its native population gives him pause. He comes upon an abandoned missionary house in Wanggemalo where he is gawked at by members of the local tribe, the Kombai. A typical ritual of the Kombai is cutting potential sorcerers into four parts, then cooking their brains and viscera on hot stones and eating them. As Osborne delves deeper into the jungle, he is met with even greater peril where he eats pasty-floured grubs and meets natives who know nothing of an outside world. Osborne's cynicism wears away in this section as he develops an honest rapport with the Papuan jungle natives much to his chagrin. It is indeed a grand journey by a most English gentleman.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Opinionated and fascinating, August 31, 2007

By 

John Glines (Bangkok, Thailand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall (Paperback)

I like a writer who's opinionated, and Osborned is certainly that. This is not a guidebook. It's one man's opinion of where he's been, what he's seen, and what he's experienced. For me, that makes fascinating reading. And as an expat living in Bangkok, I must say that his basic take on Bangkok is spot on. It seems just off the cuff but he has a real grasp of the city he calls "Hedonopolis", Bangkok being today what Venice was during the time of young Englishmen taking the Grand Tour. Chai yo!