Swimming to Angola: ? And Other Tips for Overland Treks Around the World

by Christopher S. Blin

This is not your grandfather's idea of a travel book. Swimming to Angola is a gregarious look at how to help improve Third World conditions, and make it back home safely from 96 countries -- with all limbs hopefully attached in the right places. It tells what to do if challenged by machine gun-waving security forces, or if Gypsies are getting a little too close for comfort. Readers can learn how to drive from the USA down to South America, or even the length of the African continent. Tips include how to manage local currency fluctuations to get the best values, while avoiding a myriad of scams that are designed to separate travelers from their resources. The destinations in these pages have rarely, if ever, made it to those high-gloss volumes of global travel literature. And for a good -- or at least logical -- most people in so-called 'advanced' countries looking for 'exotic' locales to spend time in, normally wouldn't want to go here. These are places that we might consider deep in poverty and hopelessness, where civil wars rage, where dictators confiscate land for their own use, where babies starve, and where travel itself is crimped by men in battle fatigues carrying automatic rifles. It also highlights real danger, moments when less luck or less wise on-the-spot decisions might have been life threatening. However, this is an occupational hazard for any hardy world traveler with a yen to veer off the well-beaten path. Traveling light in the pocketbook, in fact, is one of the rules of this book -- the reason being that you don't want to stand out and become a target, especially in the Third World. Being Western looking enough as it is, you don't need a sign around the neck "Free money for everybody, right here."

296 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2007

Reviews

[Leanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Way too much "look at me" (pointlessly minimized with false humility) and way too little actual experience in the countries he speaks of. I've lived (not just traveled) in a few of the countries he writes about and while there is certainly a culture of bribery and "special taxes" in them, it is not the constant barrage he portrays- especially if one isn't always trying to do things with expired visas, no money, and the desire to do things simply because one has been asked to refrain. We learned so much and enjoyed our years in those countries without having 1/10th the run-ins he did.

I'm still trying to figure out where in Ghana he found white sand beaches with clear blue water. We were at Ghanaian beaches from Accra to Takoradi (at the border with Côte d'Ivoire) and never saw water that wasn't brown (poor and aging infrastructure). One of my son's school's community service projects was to periodically work to clean the beaches which are covered in plastic bags of feces and hypodermic needles. So where, I wonder, was this author actually?

Although there was very little substance and much self aggrandizing the author correctly pointed out the value of being open to new cultures and staying positive, so - one star.

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book badly needed an editor and a proofreader. The frequent typos were very distracting, but not distracting enough for me to miss the author’s giant ego that made itself known in every chapter through his patronizing comments about “the natives” and offputting comments about hooking up with very young women all over the worrld. The author is a bully, a show-off, and a poor writer. No wonder I found this book in a Little Free Library - glad I didn’t buy it.

[Brad Ryder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Copy-pasted from my Amazon review:

So, I was in Old Town, San Diego, just minding my own business, you see, when this tall, gregarious, self-confident guy strolled toward me with a book in his hand. I knew he was going to try and sell it to me. And I am very glad he did. Christopher Blin writes just the way he presented himself that day -- easy going, straightforward, light-hearted, but confident and determined.

Before I bought the book, I was thinking, "Okay, how can I politely get out of this? Maybe my wife and daughter will finish their shopping quickly." But it turned out that the subject matter of the book is something that interests me, which is traveling the world, especially Africa. Occasionally I'll visit LonelyPlanet.com just to see if the world has gotten any less hostile, so I can go. But I probably never will.

Luckily for me, Blin has gone, and he's visited many places. Along the way he made friends, and helped others, and always left a little part of himself to try and improve the lives of those he met. He writes about his travels in such a way that you feel you're with him. In fact, now that I know him better by his writing, I'd like to go back to Old Town and sit and talk with him for a while, but that was a few weeks ago and he's no doubt moved on by now.

If you have any wanderlust in you at all, or just enjoy reading about someone who does, I think you'll enjoy this book.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book needs an editor. There's potential here, but two glaring things stopped me. First, the smaller one: there's a lot of grammatical/wordy things wrong in here. Just the acknowledgments that used "who's" when it should have been "whose" were trying.

Second, and more glaring: There's no context. There is a map at the beginning with dates of travels, but most of the stories are presented out of time. There's no internal context for the narrator's personal growth; there's no external context against the narrative of history happening in those places. Without context, the stories are interesting but disjointed as a whole.