Tales From Nowhere (A Lonely Planet Anthology) Edited by Don George

Equatorial Guinea

Tales from Nowhere is a collection of 30 travel essays centered around the theme of “nowhere.” Nowhere refers to literally the middle of nowhere - the absence of people, attractions, etc. (such as the short story featuring “Cool Beans” in Northern Australia. But nowhere also refers to finding the best part of traveling, connections and beauty, in unexpected places, such as the first story which takes place in a Chinese airport and another story about the traveler’s favorite part of their trip to Vietnam was being stranded in a small village after their bus crashed.

Overall, I really enjoyed this anthology. I often struggle with travel writing because there’s a pretentiousness of privileged people writing about finding the most “authentic” experiences, which are either incredibly intrusive or absent of human connection. Only a handful of stories were like this in this book. The one that stands out as the best example of this took place in Thailand, where the author “comically” recounts how they got lost in the jungle trying to find the most authentic Thai experience. Recounting the story in the past tense, the author recognizes their views as “stupid, rich, white boys traveling like idiots,” but there’s still a level of pride in their storytelling that is irritating.

I chose “The Worst Place on Earth” to be the “location” for this book. This is mainly because I thought Equatorial Guinea would be a difficult country to find another book about. But I also really enjoyed this essay. The essay was about when a group of travel writers were drinking in a bar, and they were trying to decide what was the “worst” place they’d ever been. Everyone struggled. Each country has its redeeming qualities - wonderful, hardy people or indescribable scenic beauty. The only exception they could think of was Equatorial Guinea. It is referenced, however, that if they thought about it hard enough, they would be able to find something eventually. I found this scene a good representative of the book as a whole and depicted a scene that could have been the inspiration for this anthology. Many of the adventures that were written about had inconveniences or unexpected twists, but then those became the best part of it all. Even Nowhere has its redeeming and wonderful qualities.

Review by the Numbers

Overall: 4/5

Writing: 5/5

Message: 4/5

Plot: n/a

Character Development: n/a