Visiting Places That Other People Try To Leave. Weird Travel With Adam Fletcher
Weird travel is visiting places that other people try to leave or places that are not usually thought of as tourist destinations. Adam Fletcher talks about North Korea, the unexpected beauty of Chernobyl, a tuk-tuk race across India, and the death rituals of Sulawesi, as well as the peculiarities of being British, and how to notice the unique weirdness of your own country, wherever that is. Adam Fletcher is the best-selling author of Weird Travel books and humorous memoirs, including Don’t Go There, Don’t Come Back, and Tuk-Tuk for Two. You can find all his books on Amazon. Show notes * What is weird travel — and why is it a different way to approach the world? * How travel can help us notice strange things about our own culture — and a discussion on being British * Travel in North Korea * Questioning the morality of travel to places where the money goes to a regime you might not want to support * Weighing the danger of a trip against the desire for something unique * Respecting a culture’s rules, even if you don’t agree with them * Learning to tune into the weird and unusual in every place * Driving 1000km in India in a tuk-tuk race * Recommended travel books You can find Adam Fletcher at Adam-Fletcher.co.uk and his books on Amazon. Transcript of the interview Jo: Adam Fletcher is the best-selling author of Weird Travel books and humorous memoir, including Don’t Go There, Don’t Come Back, and Tuk-Tuk for Two. Welcome, Adam. Adam: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Jo: I’m excited to talk about this topic. What is weird travel and what drew you to write about these kinds of places? Adam: Weird travel is kind of my term, and the more common term for this genre is probably something like ‘dark tourism,’ which I think has a kind of negative spin that I don’t really like. So, I guess it’s going to places that other people are trying to leave, would probably be how I would describe it, or places that are not kind of primarily thought of as being tourist destinations. Jo: What drew you to this topic? Adam: I grew up in one of those places, which is an extremely unremarkable, small, market town in Norfolk, in the southeast of England, that was actually featured in this book, Crap Towns, I remember. I always had the feeling that this is a strange place, and I don’t really understand it, and they don’t really seem to understand me. As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going to leave this place and try to understand what is odd about it, and if the rest of the world works the same way or not. And maybe it’s like that thing about if you only speak one language, you don’t really know how any languages work. I think it’s a bit like that with cultures. If you only know one culture, you don’t really know anything about culture, or how your culture works. You’ll be like the fish swimming along that doesn’t know you’re in water. Because I think as soon as I could leave, which was basically straight after uni, I then started traveling, and that gave me the distance to get a look at British culture, and myself, and more of a feeling for why I didn’t fit so well in that place. I just got really interested in edge cases, and strange places. I guess we’re storytellers so we know the power of story to unite a group of people around a shared belief, and mobilize them. And I’m interested in what happens when people take that tool and use it for bad instead of good. Jo: That’s really interesting. You do actually have a book,