There's a point, somewhere in the middle of the dense Papua jungle, where one of Lawrence Osborne's travelling companions tries to figure out their location from his all-knowing GPS map and gets back the reassuring reply: "No data."
This is exactly the kind of destination Osborne had in mind when he set out to find the place beyond tourism's reach. For months, he has been heaving his pale-skinned bulk toward the paradise of nowhere, travelling a compare-and-contrast pilgrimage route of his own devising that inexplicably takes in the theme-park malls of Dubai and the sex-change clinics of Bangkok. The usual pleasures crafted to draw in global tourists evoke reactions from him like "hideous" and "odious" -- he's a seen-it-all travel writer who can't believe in the Four Seasons version of anything any more, and it's only the data-free zones that will give meaning to all this restless movement.
"The problem of the modern traveller is that he has nowhere left to go," Osborne tells us at the outset of The Naked Tourist, though that sounds more like the complaint of a jaded travel writer than the sudden despair of someone looking for a summer vacation spot. He protests too much, if only to justify yet another writerly quest into the unknown, but you don't have to fabricate the horror of Dubai to win round those of us who define utopia differently. The greater challenge for Osborne is to persuade us that paradise really is to be found at the ends of the Earth, where days start with a breakfast of roast mouse legs, the teenaged porters club to death the monitor lizard you were rapturously admiring a moment before and the welcoming party at the village that has never seen a white person shoots arrows by your ear just to watch you flinch.
"Why," Osborne rightly asks, even before he has seen his Papuan bag carriers turn the picturesque into snack food, ". . . do we pursue a relentless exploration of the planet when the thing that most interests us is ultimately ourselves?"
But paradoxically, the most interesting parts of this relentlessly questioning book come in the intervals when he applies his inquisitive brain to other people -- particularly the jungle-dwellers of Papua who need an hour to steel themselves before they'll touch the Englishman's white skin. The ultimate reward for getting away from it all? You turn into the exotic creature, the one being visited.
