Travel Tales: Idiots Abroad is a very funny book. It's a collection of Michael Brein's funniest travel accounts of the nearly 2,000 interviews with travelers he has met in his own travels around the world over the last four decades. Although the typical travel stories collected in the books that make up the True Travel Tales series are ordinarily oriented towards safety and security in travel, the very scary accounts of the risks and dangers in your travels and managing to often just barely to escape, the tales are mainly of the fearful and dangerous sorts of things that can and do happen to travelers. Mostly these things will not happen to you. You'll read in the series plenty of examples of the real, raw fear and very unsettling occasions that may pop up now and again in your travels.
This book, Travel Tales: Idiots Abroad, however, pauses all of this. Instead of dealing with all sorts of true accounts of close calls and great escapes in connection with all sorts of travel situations including chases, foiled kidnappings, attacks, roadblocks, scary places, trips from hell, borders, and police, hitchhiking, international spying, smuggling, and intrigue, being in the wrong places at the wrong times, terror attacks, bandits, Mexican standoffs, airplane crashes, accidents and mishaps, white slavery, robberies, sexual harassment and assaults and more, rather, the series now pauses to simply make you laugh!
Instead of reading about the dangers and mishaps of others, whereby you'll focus on and gain healthier respect for the true dangers and risks of travel and adventure... the point of Travel Tales: Idiots Abroad is purely and simply to make you laugh... to enjoy, for all it's worth, the many moments among two thousand or so travelers of their shared moments of smiles, of chuckles, of laughs, and yes, of belly laughs, too. This is the time to enjoy those special moments that you, yourself, just happened to be the focus of or perhaps at the behest of others.
And make no mistake, whereas some of these stories and laughs are so profoundly silly, others are the stuff of keepsake memories. Many of the funny accounts of travelers in Travel Tales: Idiots Abroad are the tales of others; many are about us making others laugh instead, yes... often at our own expense. And that makes them especially funny and memorable.
Yes, indeed, we are often the Crazy Stupit Scoundrels, ourselves, and I am one of you! I have often, myself, been the Idiot Abroad, and I am all the happier and prouder for it! The travel tales told in Idiots Abroad are things we got away with and laughed about later. Pouring bubble bath in Trafalgar fountain in London, getting away with things we'd dare not do at home, even, like eating critters in restaurants we'd never think of doing but for being overseas, like daring to eat a "pressed rabbit" (a roasted guinea pig in Peru), or Steak Tartare (raw horsemeat in France) or a potentially deadly poisonous fugu fish in Japan! Yep, like trying to talk two Italian motorcycle cops out of giving you a speeding ticket — and succeeding! — yes... in Italy for God's sake (everybody speeds in Italy!).
Nope, such adventures may not ever happen to you, but assuredly something funny will! You'll laugh at these stories in Travel Tales: Idiots Abroad; you'll remember your own; you'll look forward to your next laughs overseas. And after you pick up this book, read a tale or two, and set it back down; you'll do so with a smile.
