Product Description

Description: What does it take to follow your dreams? "DEAD MEN DON'T LEAVE TIPS: Adventures X Africa" by Brandon Wilson is an edge of your seat tale about a couple's seven month dream odyssey - 10,000 miles across Africa from top-to-tip. After their "ship of fools" safari turns into a nightmare, they set off across Africa alone. DEAD MEN DON'T LEAVE TIPS takes readers onto the crazed roads of African adventure and into the hearts of its people-while transforming the travelogue into a raw, penetrating, more poignant genre. From the award-winning author of YAK BUTTER BLUES: A Tibetan Trek of Faith. From flap: What does it take to follow your dream? Quite a bit, if your "dream" involves crossing Africa. That's what one couple discovers when they set off on a seven-month overland journey from Morocco to Cape Town. As dedicated independent travelers, they'd already traveled around the world. But was a trans-African odyssey too much for even them? Who do you "cadeau?" How do you create tantalizing dishes from grubs? Or avoid having a spear tossed through your camera? With trepidation, they join an English do-it-yourself overland safari. Flung into the midst of twenty-one odd companions, they're shocked to discover that many of them have never even camped before. And the "guides" know Africa as well as the dark side of the moon. After their dream turns into a nightmare, they eventually set off across Africa-alone. DEAD MEN DON'T LEAVE TIPS is a captivating tale filled with a passion for travel, spontaneity and unbridled adventure. It is often funny, sometimes anguished, yet always real. Nothing is held back or glossed-over. Wilson takes you onto the crazed roads of Africa, through the everyday ups and downs, and into the lives and hearts of its people. He shows us once again that the real joy of travel is the thrill of getting there. Reviews: "Journeys of body and soul in every sense of the word... Interlaced with this honesty and detail are Wilson's beautiful prose, obvious passion for adventure and a deep inquisitiveness about other cultures, making this book a pleasure to read. Highly recommended." ~ Midwest Book Review "A masterful crossroads of characters, exotic places, history and human drama in a rig that never stalls, and allows the devil to drive his own ill-behaved backyard..." ~ Richard Bangs, author of "Mystery of the Nile" "Entertaining and a monument to those who would take on the challenge of land travel across one of the most dangerous, unhealthy continents in the world." ~ Heartland Reviews "Honest, gritty and insightful...it makes the world's most exciting continent read just like that." ~ John Heminway, author of "No Man's Land: A Personal Journey into Africa" "I was swept away by the drama and storytelling...Wilson is never a tourist. He travels heart-first with both feet solidly on the ground and his curiosity always in high gear. He is exactly the right person to be writing travel books for the rest of us." ~ Maui Weekly "Travel writing at its most sublime, a paean to Africa in all her contradictory beauty, and a tribute to the resiliency of those who travel beyond boundaries not only in search of meaning, but also of understanding." ~ C.W. Gortner, author of The Secret Lion "One of the most engaging travel books we have read." ~ RealTravelAdventures.com "Powerful and gripping story...Fascinating, informative, humorous, poignant, surprising...a terrific read from first page to last-would make a popular addition to any personal or community library Travel section." ~ Midwest Book Review, Travel Shelf "Aficionados of travel books will delight in "Dead Men Don't Leave Tips"...a hybrid of Paul Theroux and Tom Robbins, combining the raw frankness and keen observation of Theroux with the intelligent humor & playful language of Robbins...Readers who have a penchant for traveling will happily devour this book and be sorry it ended. I was!" ~ A. Buklarewicz, Reviewer, Amazon.com

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166213 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Richard Bangs, author The Lost River and Mystery of the Nile/adventurer/executive producer Yahoo Media Group
"This is a masterful crossroads of characters, exotic places, history and human drama in a rig that never stalls..."

Joseph W. Bean, Book Reviewer, Maui Weekly(Hawaii), October 26, 2005
"…an adventure journal only the craziest traveler would take as a guide. But we can dream, can't we?" (5 shakas)

Andrew F. O’Hara, author of The Swan: Tales of the Sacramento Valley/journalist
"…a magical story laced with humor and tragedy…it brings Africa to readers on an intimate level not found elsewhere."

Customer Reviews

Boring and out of date
It is hard to believe how somebody can describe such an exciting trip in such a boring way. Describing some of the marvels of Africa takes the author one or two paragraphs, the whining about his fellow passengers on the other had can go on for dozen and dozens of pages. Also, it is woefully out of date. Zaire hasn't been Zaire since 1997, Mozambique has not been in a Civil War since 1992. It is somewhat unclear whether the trip took place before then or whether the author didn't bother checking his facts (similar to the Caiman that showed up in Malawi). In short, annoying to read.

Irresistible African Travel Journal
All through Brandon Wilson's Dead Men Don't Leave Tips: Adventures X Africa one idea kept coming to me. Parallax! That's not a word that comes to mind every day. In science, it means getting better or more complete information about displacement or movement by collecting data from two points of view that are not in a straight line with the thing you are examining or learning about.
"After all those months of struggle, doubts of sanity and infinite challenges," Wilson writes near the end of the book, "we'd fulfilled our dream. We'd crossed the length of Africa from Ceuta to the Cape." All along the rugged, often road-less road dotted with rare moments of genuine rest--sarcastically (?) called "pure luxxxurrry"--Wilson pursues the parallax view of everything everywhere at every opportunity. He studies his fellow travelers and their motivations and observations like Margaret Mead recording the lives of Papua New Guineans. That, however, is nothing but technical practice for the real work of genuinely absorbing dozens or hundreds of African cultures.
To get in touch with "real Africa" and to understand lives as they are lived, Wilson talks with people who are not in the business of guiding and informing (and even listens to those who are in the overland/travel business). Sometimes the informant is a person eking out an existence in, say, the Central African Republic. When it is, he inquires of two or more people in different situations and observes still more. Sometimes he collects information from a Peace Corps worker or an Embassy employee. And always, he reports his own direct observations and often those of his intrepid and obviously longsuffering wife as well.
Parallax, for Wilson, is clearly a method for chipping through individual biases and official "facts" toward the precious truth which, over and over, turns out to be that misery and joy, dreams and wishes, family feelings and love are the same for us all no matter where or how we live. Fortunately, Wilson never stops treasuring the differences from culture to culture in Africa, and he never becomes numb to the differences between African cultures and his everyday life on Maui.
We, the readers, have the added dimension of our own experience and ideas. With luck, we are able to hold our untested perspectives gently enough that, once disproved, they can be let go painlessly.
Wilson's trek "X Africa" is not all pain and gain. As Wilson puts it, "Often you run into weird, but welcome coincidences traveling." World travelers have long known that if you spend the day on the Champs Elysées in Paris, you're sure to meet someone you know. Apparently, if you spend several months crossing Africa the long way, you're going to run into both other travelers whose paths crisscross with your own and people removed from yourself by slight degrees. "One night... we happened to share a table and talk with two U.S. Marines... one of them came from my small childhood town and the other had attended my Southern alma mater."
Coincidences are everywhere in Dead Men Don't Leave Tips, but the tale moves forward and finds its depth in the triumphant surprises. Frequently, these scenes of human contact start with someone reaching out to help himself by "helping" Wilson, then saying, "Don't worry." Often enough, the phrase introduces a series of events about which someone really should have been worrying. Then there are the other moments: the aunty with a gracious guest house, the discovery that being white isn't always a handicap in South Africa so long as people know he's not an Afrikaner, the magic of one kind of "pole-pole" travel hold-up meshing seamlessly with another.
Africa's pole-pole is a real-life opposite of Hawai`i's never very serious wiki-wiki, it means at the speed of... well, Africa.
I was swept away by the drama and the storytelling in Wilson's book. Still, it is only my second favorite travel book from the past century or so. Maybe Wilson won't mind that so much if he hears that his "adventures X Africa" are second only to his earlier Yak Butter Blues.
Even if you normally can't stand to read a travel book, give Wilson a chance. He'll win you over.

The most boring and shallow travel account ever read
I bought this book following Amazon's reader reviews but found it a pain to read.
From the start the author can't bear the way he chose to travel (overlanding with a group) and his fellow travelers... well, when on a low budget, stay graceful! If one can't stand other human beings AND can't afford a way to travel suitable to both his arrogance and means, why do it anyway?

The "traveler" seems to wander through Africa with American centered prejudices and poor references of a narrow minded background.
The reader is continuously faced with his self centered obsession for his own boring motives (if any) that he thinks anyone cares about. He makes the reader witness all his irritations and frustration of a pure misanthrope, "forgot" to check the proper geography and history and spelling of the names of the countries he goes through, remains ignorant of the world, cultures and people and till the end totally misses the whole point of traveling.

Everything, even the slight excitement he seems to feel when encountering wild animals is awkwardly written, in dry insensitive words without style.

Oh, those hundreds of dull phrases in italic! Those infinitely repeated "burro" like donkeys have Spanish names in Africa, "black" like there's a need to remind us of the color of Africa's inhabitants.
What is Lake Kiva? Lake Tanzania? Are there really "caimans" in Africa? What is a "wild west town" to anyone not American? When were there only 700 black rhinos left? "Zaire, these days, after years of war, known as DRC": check exactly when the name changed? Victoria Falls, the world highest cascades? Since when does Michelin rate up to five stars? Any need to be condescending and transcript everyone's accent again and again while oneself has no clue about foreign languages? Any need to be rude, pushy and obnoxious when addressing people?

In this long boring account of what seems to have been an ordeal to him that we are forced to share, the only human encounter that seems to have somewhat pleased the ever complaining author are... another white couple traveling and Whites in South Africa.

This is a shallow disappointing report that would disgust anyone who wishes to travel to Africa.
Thanks God we know better.