Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

by Adam Fletcher

I’ve also changed the order of a few trips to make things less chaotic and nonsensical than real life has a regrettable habit of being. Please forgive this neatening of history.

I suffer from a hereditary disease called Crippling Englishness (CE). This renders me incapable of inconveniencing people, however mildly.

allowing the frizzy hair from the sides of his head to grow free from the confines of good taste.

went the other direction, out of the driver-side window and into the faces of pedestrians, other drivers, and any inanimate objects brazen enough to be in our way. Inanimate objects he seemed to find particularly irksome.

I was pretty sure these were not terrorists, and were even, probably, The Good Guys. Protesters are almost always the good guys, right? Because protesting is way more effort than not.

you don’t see those people because those people have already won.

When it came to communication, she was a quantity person cruelly stuck in a quality world.

“I wasn’t sure you would come. Were you not scared?” Annett and I exchanged a blank look that said we’d have been perfectly willing to be scared if only someone had told us what about.

cruelly orphaning the remainder of her tea.

We made noises that emphasised the possibility of this while simultaneously hinting at its underlying impossibility.

From that balcony we had a stunning view sweeping down the hillside. We could see at least a hundred balconies from this vantage point, and people emerging onto them to hit saucepans with wooden spoons: a kind of kitchenware orchestra. It was a remarkable spectacle. Simple, effective, lo-fi dissent. A Mexican Saucepan Wave. In the flat diagonally underneath Ada’s, a small girl of no more than five came outside armed with a spatula. Her mother bent over to hold a saucepan at the right height, so she could swipe enthusiastically at it. Occasionally she even hit it. It was utterly adorable. “Should we join in?” I asked Annett.

Adrenaline surged through us. Go. Move. Where? Who cares. Now…

seemed totally calm, as if he were heading back from a trip to the zoo. I guess, in a way, he was—the Human Zoo.

Fremdschämen is a German word for the untranslatable but instantly recognisable emotion of feeling shame on someone’s behalf. A kind of embarrassment once removed.

I was suddenly enjoying the sensation of being found.

The stairwell wore the day’s spicy perfume—eau de rébellion.

the air a toxic soup.

My lungs screamed in anger.

No. It couldn’t be, could it? I’d just risked potential arrest and my health and for… Nobody could be that stupid, could they?

“Oh, the stupidity, it burns.”

It really wasn’t the right time to think about tomorrow’s salad. Plus, it was already tomorrow.

We watched the twenty-four-hour-news channels. It felt strange to be the news for a change.

Do you want to go find yourself?” “I don’t know. Maybe. Or just get lost a little in parts of the world other tourists ignore.

CHINA: “IT’S UGLY IN HERE. AND MURDERY.”

I’ll give you change. A billion humans’ worth of it.

elderly Chinese bunking above her. That sound, we deduced, was the man reaching deep within himself and returning an offering of his phlegm, which he’d spat into a small carrier bag. He was attaching this bag to the corner of his bunk. A spit bag. “China is disgusting,”

“I hate it here,” she said. “The weather is horrible. Everything we’ve tried has gone wrong. I hope you’re getting something out of it, because I’m not sure I am.”

There seemed to be a one-size-fits-all problem-solving solution here that I’d summarize as keep throwing people at it until it goes away.

his faded jeans—jeans faded through wear, not the whims of fashion—had

The steel in his gaze could have been mined for millennia. He reminded me of a Chinese John Wayne.

That night was long, every second cursed with the heft of ten.

Actually, vast chunks of China are as barren as the moon. The cities feel overcrowded, so much so that they’re building cities they don’t even need yet. Backup cities. Reserve cities. B-side cities.

I apologised to my angry limbs. They’d called a meeting and were threatening to evict me. My back was particularly outspoken.

In normal life we’re pretty good at believing we’re highly evolved because we’ve invented things like laser eye surgery, crème brûlée, and Istanbul. But there are some experiences—getting stuck in traffic, giving birth, being hungry—when you realise how flimsy civilisation really is.

How quickly things changed. An easy thing to conclude in China. No other place on earth was changing faster. It’s easy to automatically think that progress must be positive.

“How hungry are you? Like on a scale from one to ten?” I asked. “I was hungry, about six hours ago. Then I was an eleven. Now I’m just kind of… five?” “Same. It’s like because my body knows there’s no food, it’s stopped bothering to bug me for it.”

I didn’t do the research I would normally have done about why it’s a really, really bad idea to do China in January.

It was the most sensible thing anyone had said in hours.

But his bow had many strings, which made it closer to a harp. Upon that harp he planned to play a tune of great ingenuity, I just knew it.

“We’re here, right? W-U-H-A-N?”

levy

"levee"?

I’m actually looking forward to work because it won’t be this.”

We had wanted weird and strange and different. Actually, maybe I had wanted these things and Annett had wanted to give them to me.

we found the part of the melee that had the buses in it.

It looked the country was at war with moles. It was losing.

Annett and I traded glances, unsure where we were from and why exactly we were no longer there.

his face permanently failing to restrain the sheer wonder that was his own existence.

and took it to Hulk. Hulk didn’t move. Trees don’t move, either. Neither do walls.

I could only remember her first name. This seemed to upset him on a very deep, personal level. I didn’t tell him I was actually only 62 percent certain that this was even her first name.

I went to where calm was normally stored within me, but everyone there said they’d never heard of it. They recommended I try something called anguish instead.