by JULIET WATERS

As soon as I finish writing this, I’ll be packing for a press trip to the Dominican Republic. I’ve done this before, so I have an idea of the worst that will happen: undrinkable piña coladas by the Flintstone pool at a three-star all-inclusive, a gruelling, four-hour drive to a depressing industrial city that desperately needs tourist dollars, and a middle-aged gonzo journalist nagging our guides for a visit to a cockfighting coliseum. I’m willing to endure this for three days in Samana to see some of the most beautiful untouristed beaches in the world. Next month, a new international airport will open and cut the drive from five hours to 20 minutes, so it’s now or never.

Paradise is, unfortunately, a bitch to write about. There’s not a lot to say about sand, water and rocks, no matter how nicely arranged. On the other hand, you can send someone who can’t write for shit to a cockfight and they’re bound to come back with something interesting. Case in point: our old pals from Vice, formerly of Montreal, setting New York City ablaze with their media empire and now The Vice Guide to Travel.

“These aren’t vacations to Disney World, Paris or even some Outward Bound safari,” they warn us. “These are trips to the places that you see once in a while on TV and think, ‘no way in hell am I ever going there.”’

No collection of holidays in hell would be complete without the requisite trip to Beirut. Problem is that until Israel recently bombed it back into crumbling cement, Beirut was actually becoming a reasonably cosmopolitan tourist draw. No mention of this in Shane Smith’s opening essay. There’s some vague blah, blah about Beirut’s special carpe diem spirit before Shane takes off to a small town run by a colourful druglord. A place that, frankly, sounds like a lot of fun. Whatever respect I’ve lost for him as a chronicler of hell is, however, restored as soon as I watch the companion DVD. His blood-chilling mini-doc on Hezbolah’s youth camp, where kids barely out of puberty are trained as suicide martyrs, is worth the price of the guide alone.

In general, the short essays in this book, though entertaining, are relatively lame summaries or addendums to the DVD travelogues to places as bizarre and horrifying as Chernobyl, the Congo, Darra (a gun bazaar in Pakistan,) Nuevo Germania (what remains of the Third Reich’s Nazi utopia) and the worst slums of Rio. There are a few gems in here that couldn’t be videotaped. David Choe’s eyewitness account of the murder of a retarded pygmy is like a hipster heart of darkness. And Pella Kagerman’s quirky Swedish take on Chernobyl is a nice contrast to the neo-gonzo hysteria of the rest of the book.

What it comes down to is that if you see someone about to use the book or the DVD as a beer coaster (which could happen because the book’s pretty small), protect the DVD. You’ll be glad you did when you see Derrick Beckles deep in the jungles of Paraguay interviewing the two last citizens of Nuevo Germania. The Schweikhart brothers are reputed to be cannibals and live, barely, in subsistence squalor. If you’re wondering what ever happened to Dr. Mengele, the locals claim he used to wake them up every night with his nightmares, played soccer with a gun, and eventually performed self-surgery by putting in his own catheter bag. When you look around at some of disastrous political regimes out there, it can be hard to find something to cheer you up. If you don’t have access to a fabulous beach, may I suggest a brief encounter with some very sad Nazis?

THE VICE GUIDE TO TRAVEL, ED. JESSE PEARSON,
VICE, HC, 67PP, $26