Dom Joly - The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing in the worlds most unlikely holiday destinations

Praise for The Dark Tourist

Destinations that would make a travel agent go pale Sunday Times

Brilliantly funny, irreverent writing with non-sickly compassion for those who live under the most oppressive regimes... a very human travelogue Country Life

Readability in spades Scotsman

Intoxicating and hilarious. Like all the best travel writing, it makes you long to be in the seat next to him John Niven

Also by Dom Joly

Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

The Downhill Hiking Club

ROBINSON

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

This paperback edition published in 2021 by Robinson

Copyright Dom Joly 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47214-605-2

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To Parker and Jackson:
I hope that one day you both will be lucky enough to get to see the world as I have...

The cool thing about being famous is travelling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.

Britney Spears

I think that deep down Im a coward. Im not sure if I was actually born yella or whether growing up during the civil war in Lebanon made it inevitable. Certainly I can remember being constantly terrified for periods of my childhood as the noise of fighting from Beirut used to permeate our entire house. Sometimes the war would draw closer and shells would actually land in the garden all around the house. You read about people being calm under fire I never was. My dad was brave. Hed fought against the Japanese as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm in World War Two. From what I later found out, this had affected him deeply. As a kid, however, I had no idea about this. Growing up, it was all about a stiff upper lip, being courageous. Dad would refuse to sleep downstairs even when we were being shelled. He would stay up in his room at the top of the house, incredibly vulnerable to any incoming projectile, while I was below terrified that he might be killed.

I think this left me with a feeling of character inadequacy that Ive always been subconsciously trying to rectify.

Its because of this curious background that Ive forever been in awe of people who did do brave and adventurous things. As a kid, I used to think that foreign correspondents were the most exciting of people. They were professional seekers of chaos, rushing to the scene of any global disaster, willingly hurling themselves into the fire. Its what I always wanted to be.

When I left school I went to the London School of Oriental and African Studies. I studied Arabic for a while and then International Relations. When I left, however, instead of going abroad in search of adventure, I disappointed myself. I had this desperate need to settle, to put down some roots. So my twenties were spent in London, initially doing jobs varying from barman to sandwich-maker at MTV. Then I got a lucky break and spent nine months in Prague working as an intern for the European Commission just after the fall of Communism. This was my first proper adventure and I loved it.

Returning to London and using my newly gained political credentials, I got a job in Westminster and worked for both the BBC and ITN on parliamentary-news programmes. Im a current-affairs junkie and I was in the thick of it. It was politically very exciting but I was nonetheless inherently bored.

Then another lucky break led to my CV landing on the desk of a company hiring researchers for a new political-comedy programme, The Mark Thomas Comedy Product. It was a precursor to Michael Moore and Brass Eye and it was all about irritating the Establishment. I got the job and in my first week was driving a tank through a McDonalds drive-thru and haranguing MPs while dressed as a large penis. I was hooked comedy was fun, it was exciting and, unbelievably, you got paid to do it.

So I stayed in comedy and eventually made a show called Trigger Happy TV. It was kind of a surreal Candid Camera and was a huge hit. It sold to more than fifty-five countries worldwide and it made me famous. Now most people knew me as the man who dressed as a squirrel and shouted loudly into a huge mobile phone. That was fine by me but I didnt want to be pigeonholed. Success opened many doors. I got a weekly column in the Independent and started travel writing for The Sunday Times.

The travel writing was a godsend. In a tiny way, I slowly became my own little foreign correspondent. Whenever I had some spare time I would fly off somewhere and explore. I went to Vietnam and squeezed into Vietcong tunnels. I went to Nicaragua and skied down the side of a live volcano. I drove across Syria looking for a cave in which Id scratched my name as a ten-year-old boy. I explored the legendary Empty Quarter on the borders of Oman and Yemen. I drank lethal homemade vodka in a tenement block outside Saint Petersburg. I scuba-dived on ancient wrecks off Dominica and cage-dived with great white sharks in South Africa.

I had finally put down my roots: I had my lovely wife and kids in our house in the Cotswolds. So I lived this curious dual life and the older I got the more I became drawn to explore offbeat and curious destinations. Something else inside of me appeared to be trying to resolve itself. I had no name for this curious wanderlust until I read a certain article in the Observer. It was about Guyana, which sits on the northern coast of South America and is one of the most inhospitable countries in the world.

I once did a comedy show in which I pretended to be a man ringing various foreign embassies from prison. The story I told them was that I had just won a lot of money on the Lottery and planned to tour the world when I got out. I was therefore planning my itinerary and wanted to know whether or not their country was worth a visit. When I got the Guyanan ambassador I asked him what there was to see in his country.

Not much, really, he answered apologetically, just snakes and swamps...

The Minster for Tourism in Guyana obviously realized that they had a problem as well and the piece in the Observer told of his plan to encourage visitors. Guyana was infamous for having been the location of the Jonestown Massacre. Though dubbed a massacre, this was in fact the mass suicide of 918 members of a cult that followed an American nutter called Jim Jones. Men, women and children all drank cyanide at the cults community in northern Guyana on 18 November 1978. The Guyanan Minister for Tourism wanted to rebuild Jonestown so that tourists could come and visit the site. They could even stay overnight and pretend to be in the cult. To most sane people this sounded like an absolutely terrible idea. But I understood that he was aiming this venture at people like me I actually found the whole idea compelling. The plan was, the