Gunnar Garfors made a bet he
would visit all 198 (at the time, by his calculation) countries in the world by
the age of 40, and his 2014 book (English translation 2015) is a sketchy diary
of his trips. He states near the beginning
that he abhors travel guides because they ‘reduce creativity and destroy
impulsiveness.’ Rather, he wants to
arrive with an open mind and find out from locals what is worth doing. It is one strategy, though the traveller
risks missing out on activities a guide covers but an informant doesn’t mention. In Garfors' case it hardly matters because he has so little interest in the places he passes through in pursuit of his goal.
Romania has a page (pp. 159-160)
in a section mainly devoted to culinary experiences. It begins with a flimsy descriptive whirl
that takes in the heaviness of the Palace of the Parliament; Ceaușescu; Timișoara, where the 1989
revolution started and where years later Garfors met a local named Flory, upon
whom the revolution had made an impression though she was only a child; Flory
lives in Sibiu, ‘not far from Transylvania’, Garfors not realising Sibiu is in Transylvania (cue Dracula reference
anyway); a sentence on the plot of Stoker’s novel; hey, there was a real
Dracula, ‘Vlad III Dracula’, who killed a lot of people ‘thereby earning the
moniker Vlad the Impaler.’
Flory is not keen on the Dracula
link, unsurprisingly, though appreciative of the tourism it brings. However, ‘People should come to Transylvania
for the beauty, not the beast,’ as she puts it, and Garfors agrees, though he
still feels the mystique of the area is due to Stoker. Garfors goes to Sibiu where he has a meal
with Flory and her Polish boyfriend.
Flory is enthusiastic about the local cuisine, causing Garfors and the
boyfriend to poke fun at her claim that all the dishes are ‘famous’. Then the trio sample the nightlife, though
the music is loud. Romania, Garfors
opines, is like most Eastern European countries in that the girls dress
‘extremely sexily’ to be noticed, which Flory accomplishes with style. Then he leaves her and her boyfriend as the
music is too loud. Next entry: Dominica
for half a page.
Garfors states he has not written
a guidebook, something ten seconds browsing would have made clear anyway. This reader was left puzzling about the
point of what he has written, apart from the implicit invitation to express
wonder at his achievements, because as travel writing it is singularly
valueless. And the Romania entry is not
unique: he manages an entry on Russia remarkably saying nothing about Russia,
it is all about him driving nice cars while on conference jollies. On this evidence, Gunnar would have been well
advised to invest in travel guides to use as a jumping-off point for his own
explorations. Then we could perhaps have
heard more about what he found and less about his ego.
*The asterisk in the subtitle
refers to a note on the title page: ‘By Visiting Random People on Incredible
Travels to Every Country in the Whole Wide World’ (capitalised in the original). Random sums it up nicely, and we could agree
on incredible as well, though not in the sense intended by Garfors.
