Down Under - Bill Bryson

 Bill Bryson headed off Down under to Australia and wrote a book 395 pages long. He began (and ended) with saying how nobody knows anything about Australia (but we don't know anything about anyone much) and how nobody would miss it, and how one Prime Minister went for a swim and drowned (never to be found) and such stuff. We realise he is not too awed by the place and carries a healthy amount of disrespect to this place and he sustains it right through.

I burst out in laughter quite a few times which is a must with his books but the general feel I got was this - its huge, there are scattered cities out there quite far from one another. if you get stuck in the outback you'll die a painful death drinking your own urine, there are a million dangerous animals and insects and reptiles out there which can kill you in the most painful of ways, there are cities which are very boring like Canberra, there are places with no pubs, the people are sporty and also not very interesting (except for his friend and another chap he meets, he makes most others sound quite stupid. The one conversation I liked was the one he did not have - with the waitress in a place where he orders a burger and wants chips and she says - we don't serve chips and he thinks - then how did you become like that?

Once he gets chased by some dogs and lands up in somebody's backyard which was very funny. There are millions of scientific data, information he has researched with great interest, and he frequently comes up with the horrible deaths many people have had in the place (he did the same with 'Walk in the Woods'). If you want someone to write about your place in an inviting manner don't think of Bryson because he will see the many ways people can die and also dig up information of how many people have died etc.

There is stuff about the Aborigines and how they have been treated and killed and how the law sided with the killers, the forgotten generations or something like that, the guy who let 24 rabbits loose and how they ate up so much bush until they had to kill the rabbits, a couple who got stranded on the Great Barrier Reef and was never found...stuff like that. Of course he took most of a chapter to make fun of cricket as a game.

Overall, a tad too long for me but since its Bill Bryson, I'll let it pass. Its worth the laughs and the information and I am not going to Australia in a hurry anymore.