The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists - Softcover

Grescoe, Taras

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852428678 ISBN 13: 9781852428679

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2004

Synopsis

“The End of Elsewhere is a kind of post-millennium Heart of Darkness, with Grescoe’s Marlowe on the trail of a hypothetical camera-toting, Hawaiian-shirted Kurtz . . . A powerful indictment of contemporary tourism and, more fundamentally, it’s a cry against the West’s exploitation of the Third world in the era of globalization”—Quill & Quire

Witty and provocative, The End of Elsewhere is a riotous on-the-road odyssey and a brilliant history of tourism. It will be treasured by anyone who has been conned by ‘authentic’ travel.

Taras Grescoe has written articles on travel for Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Travelerand The New York Times. His first book Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec won numerous awards in Canada. He lives in Montreal.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Essential reading.”
–Globe and Mail

“Sheila Copps would have done better to give every household west of Ottawa one of these with the $20 million she squandered on flags.”
–Edmonton Journal

“Read this entertaining book.”
–Enroute

“Sacré Blues forms a GenXer’s guide to Quebec, one that’s witty, well-researched and topical...If Grescoe’s book were put on school reading lists, we’d all be richer for it.”
–Toronto Star

“A terrific study of contemporary Quebec.”
–Vancouver Sun

“Entirely entertaining, insightfully chatty and often delicious.... a revealing, gloves-off journey.” –Hour magazine

“A thorough, thoroughly entertaining Ski-Doo ride through [Quebec’s] economy, language, climate, and popular and spiritual culture...his is a book to be revisited.”
–Quill and Quire

“Grescoe know what it is to investigate a subject and nothing scares him: Sacré Blues unearths les differences in mores and morals, cuisine and language, immigration and ethnicity, economics and social policy...and much more with zest, precision and remarkable compactness. Grescoe is always interesting and accurate in his wide-angle descriptions of everything from the St-Trite rodeo to the corporate culture of Bombardier...Along the way, he catalogues everyone and everything of value that all of us ought to know about the culture of French Quebec at the beginning of the new century.”
–Globe and Mail

“Well-researched, well-written, funny in all the right places, opinionated and profound when it needs to be without pomposity, Grescoe’s book captures nicely a time-slice of what is truly a distinct society.”
–Halifax Daily News

“Reading his portrait of us, I thought to myself, Boy, I’m glad to live here! Why doesn’t everyone feel the way I do?...For the reader little accustomed to what is going on here, a primer like Grescoe’s is exactly what’s needed.”
–Montréal Gazette

“Quebec is a nice place to visit, and you would want to live there...Explaining how foreign cultures go about being distinct is Taras Grescoe’s forte...imagine an extended edition of the Lonely Planet television series, with the hip host being a resident, and you have the flavour of this book...If being well-written and informative are sufficient virtues, it will do well.”
–National Post

“[Sacré Blues] is informed by his extensive travels throughout the province, by [Grescoe’s] keen and observant eye and by a genuine thoughtfulness. Respectful of Quebeckers, but also delighting in some of the cheesier aspects of pop culture, Grescoe sets out to avoid the usual political discourse and explore the fertile tensions which have given Quebec its cultural identity.”
–Ottawa Xpress
From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

Hilariously informative: the travel book of the year

Where do you go when there?s nowhere left to go?

Now that seven hundred million tourists leave home every year, there doesn?t seem to be a single patch of earth untouched by the tourist industry. Lager louts vomit on Mediterranean beaches, extreme athletes race up the Matterhorn, and blue-collar sex tourists head to Bangkok to hook up with under-aged girls.

Rather than fleeing the hordes, Taras Grescoe plunges into the ruts where the tourists are thickest. Starting at the tip of Spain?s Land End and finishing, nine months later, on the soldier-patrolled beaches of China?s End of the Earth, he crosses the entire Eurasian landmass, touring France using Michelin guides, taking the cure at Baden-Baden, stuffing his face on a cruise ship, and following the Lonely Planet crowd from India to Kathmandu. Along the way he tells the story of leisure travel ? from the Grand Tour of old to the Cook?s tour of today, from ascetic religious pilgrimages to all-inclusive charters to tropical islands. Can a thirty-something Canadian writer survive bunking with a homophobic roommate on an If-This-Is-Tuesday bus tour? Partying with college-aged pub crawlers in Rome? Trekking among the opium-growing hilltribes of Thailand?

A hilarious on-the-road odyssey, The End of Elsewhere is also a brilliant history of world tourism. It?s a lament for the way we?ve turned the remotest corners of the world into places in which authenticity is a quaint performance put on by the locals. And it?s a superb account of how one compulsive traveller came to see that, in the end, you must go home again.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1852428678
• ISBN 13: 9781852428679
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336