Peter Moore after being dumped by the girl next door, decides to travel africa for six months visiting various areas. He decided to only travel overground and see how the mood takes him as he goes, with an end destination in mind. And travelling on his own, it's inevitable that Peter falls in with a motley cast of characters and has myriad misadventures: including coming face to face with a wild hyena with very bad breath, crossing the treacherous Sani Pass, the highest in Africa, narrowly escaping a riot by hiding in a coffin shop, saving oil-covered penguins in South Africa, and acting as an extra in a World War II epic, not to mention dodging 20,000 single woman trying to catch the eye of the king of Swaziland during the annual Reed Dance. Oh yes, and then there was the time when he was kicked out of Robert Mugabe's birthday bash at gunpoint.
Why read – After reading other travel books (mostly Bill Bryson) and enjoying them, I was recommended this one.
It took me a little while to get into this book, and I think I approached it wrong to start with. I wanted to love it because it had high praise, but I just could not get into his mind frame. I gave this book some time and eventually I got into it but probably not as much as I initially thought I would.
He was amusing to read and he got up to some adventures, but I felt that he didn't really give me a feel of Africa, and although some of his anecdotes were amusing, he was very brief about everything he did and it didn't really give a sense of belonging to the book. Some areas he wrote about were better than others and I got more of a sense of what was going on, what he was feeling, and what he was experiencing.
Overall I enjoyed this book, but not as much as I hoped I would. I didn't get a sense of Africa travel experience as I would like. But it was easy to read, amusing in places, and I did enjoy the stories he told.
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