Posted on: Sunday, June 25, 2006
Toilet tennis, anyone? Lighter side of travel
By JAYNE CLARK
USA Today
In a busy tourism season that likely will be as harrowing for travelers as it is profitable for purveyors, we're already seeking comic relief. Fortunately, it came in the mail in the form of several new guidebooks played strictly for laughs or offering offbeat advice.
Among them:
"Hotel Hobbies: 50 Things to Do in a Hotel Room That Won't Get You Arrested" by Marcus Weeks (Thunder Bay Press, $9.95). After you whip the rarely washed synthetic spread off the bed, scoff at the outrageous minibar prices and locate the TV remote, there's not a lot for the inveterate solo traveler to do in a hotel room.
"Hotel Hobbies" has 50 creative suggestions for self-amusement. In the arts and crafts department, there are directions for soap scrimshaw and dental floss pom-poms. For the restless, there's instruction in toilet tennis and in-line tray skating. The book elevates killing time on the road to fine art.
"Phaic Tan: Sunstroke on a Shoestring" by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch (Chronicle Books, $13.95). Following the success of their first Jetlag Travel Guide, "Molvana: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry," the trio has conceived another send-up that is hilarious for all its earnestness. The authors describe a fictional Asian getaway that "boasts the world's highest number of amputees per head of population, yet, paradoxically, has never won a medal at the Para Olympic Games."
"How to S*** Around the World: The Art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling" by Jane Wilson-Howarth (Travelers' Tales, $12.95) capitalizes on what it claims is the traveler's No. 1 health concern: gastrointestinal maladies.
In its new second edition, the author, a British medical doctor, not only gives the lowdown on squat toilets and other (to Westerners, anyway) bathroom exotica, but also offers general tips on staying healthy in faraway places. Peppered throughout are amusing anecdotes of misadventures in foreign toilets.
"Chicken or Beef? The World's Best Loved Airline Recipes" (Abebooks.com, $2.50). The cover photo sports the all-too-familiar image of a grayish, meat-like object, and as you're wondering what the unidentified author could possibly have cooked up inside, you open the book and find blank pages.
The joke's on you.
