Tony Wheeler is one of the co-founders of Lonely Planet – one of my favorite guide book publishers. This book is vignettes of his travels to a number of countries that most people are not going to travel to, because they’re not the safest places in the world to travel.
It’s an interesting mix, because some places are not as bad as they used to be – like Colombia, but others just seem to be getting worse as time goes on.
I found the inclusion of Nauru personally interesting – I knew absolutely nothing about it, so would not have known to include it on any list of this sort. The other countries in the book, running the gamut from Papua New Guinea, to Israel, to Haiti, are more expected.
What kind of sticks out is there is still an ordinariness of traveling to these places – they may be hard to get to, and there may be wars or other crises in the area, but there are regular people too, and places they are proud to show off to visitors. This was an interesting diversion from normal travel literature.
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