A Sarong in my Backpack

Review by Philip Blazdell

Editor's Note: This book has also been published under the title of No Touch Monkey: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late.

Some people you would love to meet on the road, whilst others you would dearly love to avoid at all costs. Those whom you would love to meet would probably be worldly-wise, witty, not shy of sampling the local narcotics, wonderful story tellers and, quite possibly, a little bit crazy. Ayan Halliday, at least if we are to believe her wonderful book, is all of these things and many more.

In a collection of essays spanning travels from Munich to Pushkar Ayan offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerrilla theatre in Romania, hysterically funny drug induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam (this essay alone is worth the cover price of the book), surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall, taming the wild dog packs of Bali and the joys of requiring the services of a bonesetter in Sumatra. Her style is both light-hearted and, at times, painfully honest, for example when a madam in Amsterdam's red-light district tries to beat her senseless for photographing one of the prostitutes, Halliday leaves no doubt that she and not the madam is the one to blame. Of the prostitute who helps diffuse the situation she writes, "in my mind, she was as incredible as the beautiful, straight-A senior who tells her fellow cheerleaders to stop harassing the chubby, pimpled boy they've nicknamed Boobie. What did she stand to profit from defending stupid me, a freeloading gawker? Nothing."

Ayan is at her funniest when running around the world sampling the local narcotics. "Smoking pot is a good vacation activity for me," she explains, "as it amplifies my natural inclination to lie on my side, eating." Unfortunately, in Asia the stuff they wind up with this time is so powerful they can barely unlock the door to their room. "Within seconds, we were pinned to separate twin beds and the curtains were speaking to me. Steerumphed, they taunted in a maddening singsong. Don't be steerumphed."

It's not just Ayun's psychotic experiences, diarrhoea, and malaria that make the book such a treat; it's her ironic way with a sentence. After signing up for a group tour of Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya, she is faced with the problem of which of her unappetizing tour mates to pitch a tent with. "Deborah seemed like she could get the job done. Elsie did, too, but she was so formal. I wanted to share my tent with a booty-shaking funmaker. Experience had not yet taught me that the booty-shaking funmakers are inevitably Australian."

This is not a profound book. It won't leave you really understanding the world more, or give you deeper insights to some of the world's most remote places but it will make you laugh and feel terribly good about the world in which we live. Ayan tends to focuses almost exclusively on her own discomforts--how poor she is, how high she is, how dirty she is, how sick she is, how unlucky she is to have male companions less game for "authentic" experiences than herself but does this in such a modest and amusing way that you almost will some great disaster to befall her just so you can enjoy her wry observations and neat-line in black-humour.

As a recent review in Amazon said, Ayun Halliday is the literary equivalent of a fine artist who can perfectly capture a reclining figure, a cathedral, or a window box of geraniums by executing but a few seemingly effortless, well-chosen brush strokes - except in this case, the reclining figure has a swollen dislocated knee, the cathedral is a frightening squat toilet, and the window box of geraniums is a rooftop of flip-flop stealing, imperious monkeys intent on bullying a hapless dog.

Overall, this is a lovely book and it would amuse both travellers and non-travellers alike.

• A Sarong in my Backpack by Ayun Halliday