The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists - Softcover

Grescoe, Taras

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771035519 ISBN 13: 9780771035517

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2006

Synopsis

Hilariously informative: the travel book of the year

Where do you go when there’s nowhere left to go?

Now that seven hundred million tourists leave home every year, there doesn’t seem to be a single patch of earth untouched by the tourist industry. Lager louts vomit on Mediterranean beaches, extreme athletes race up the Matterhorn, and blue-collar sex tourists head to Bangkok to hook up with under-aged girls.

Rather than fleeing the hordes, Taras Grescoe plunges into the ruts where the tourists are thickest. Starting at the tip of Spain’s Land End and finishing, nine months later, on the soldier-patrolled beaches of China’s End of the Earth, he crosses the entire Eurasian landmass, touring France using Michelin guides, taking the cure at Baden-Baden, stuffing his face on a cruise ship, and following the Lonely Planet crowd from India to Kathmandu. Along the way he tells the story of leisure travel – from the Grand Tour of old to the Cook’s tour of today, from ascetic religious pilgrimages to all-inclusive charters to tropical islands. Can a thirty-something Canadian writer survive bunking with a homophobic roommate on an If-This-Is-Tuesday bus tour? Partying with college-aged pub crawlers in Rome? Trekking among the opium-growing hilltribes of Thailand?

A hilarious on-the-road odyssey, The End of Elsewhere is also a brilliant history of world tourism. It’s a lament for the way we’ve turned the remotest corners of the world into places in which authenticity is a quaint performance put on by the locals. And it’s a superb account of how one compulsive traveller came to see that, in the end, you must go home again.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

Review:

?The End of Elsewhere is the only kind of travel book possible today: at once enchanting and disenchanting. With rich and pungent prose, and a bite behind his smile, Taras Grescoe lays bare the highs and lows of wanderlust on our shrinking theme-park planet with an empathic scalpel.? Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis ?Grescoe weaves humour, anthropology and travelogue into an eclectic mix that makes The End of Elsewhere one of the most original travel books to come out in years. His perspective is fresh; his prose never dull or obvious? Globe and Mail ?The End of Elsewhere is a powerful indictment of contemporary tourism and, more fundamentally, it?s a cry against the West?s exploitation of the Third World in the era of globalization? Quill & Quire ?The greatest advantage of armchair travel is that you get to select your companions. Grescoe? could scarcely be a better guide? Vancouver Sun

About the Author:

Taras Grescoe has made a specialty of writing about foreign cultures for such publications as the Times of London, National Geographic Traveller, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune Magazine. His critically acclaimed book, Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec, won the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction, the First Book Award, and The Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0771035519
• ISBN 13: 9780771035517
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328