“What a phenomenal trip Craig Nelson takes us on. I don’t know which made me laugh harder, the outrageous people and places Craig describes, or his hilarious travel antics. Let’s Get Lost is a gem.” –Lily Tomlin

“The best travel book since Gulliver’s, but with better Yahoos and fewer boring old Houyhnhnms.” –P.J. O’Rourke

“You’ll laugh till you lose it with Craig Nelson, as this wisecracking runaway escorts readers to his version of the outer limits in Let’s Get Lost: Adventures in the Great Wide Open. Nelson, who grew up in a Texas suburb where he learned early on the power of unpredictability, is determined to visit the few remaining places on Earth that still differ a little from home, places where great mystery and romance are still a part of the landscape. He’s particularly fond of regions where he seems as exotic to the people and creatures that he encounters as they seem to him. Whether sloth-watching in the forests of the Amazon, hunting with Tanzania’s bushmen, communing with orangutans in Borneo and gorillas in Uganda, and dancing with the Dani in New Guinea, Nelson is a wonderful guide. He finds what’s surprising and takes readers along for an exploration that might otherwise leave them squeamish.This is traveling, and travel writing, at its best - an honest look at cultural differences that might make you wrinkle your nose, hike up your skirt and shudder, but without the “I’m right, you’re wrong” kind of judgment that usually goes with the grimace. Not above playing the fool - an endearing feature in any traveler - Nelson leads readers to the ends of the Earth and into the kind of culture clashes where someone generally ends up embarrassed. Fortunately, he seems to understand that it’s so much more civilized to ensure that the someone isn’t your host. In his efforts to put all parties at ease in some thoroughly challenging situations, he is continually entertaining, keeping everyone concerned unbalanced and amused with his sensational chatter and clowning. In the midst of his antics - the Fruit-Eating Bat Dance, the cannibal kissing, the serenades for the Lalati women - he delivers on the profound realization that the only way to really get away from it all is to find an escape from yourself.”– Linda Watanabe McFerrin, San Francisco Chronicle

“Craig Nelson’s Let’s Get Lost is intelligent, funny and DANGEROUSLY informative. I love it.” –Lynne Russell, CNN

I’d like to travel with Craig Nelson–but that would be a shame, since he is at his best when knocking about alone, enduring bad beds, bugs and bureaucrats, feeding his travel fix. In Let’s Get Lost, that means meeting “people living on the other side of nowhere” who want nothing to do with the 20th or even the 11th or fifth centuries. “I like to go look at them” is his motto. While the book begins with the least engaging essay, on China, read on to his escapades in Egypt, South America, India and Indonesia. He even finds humour in places he doesn’t go: “I wouldn’t get to see the Asmat, those extraordinary sculpture cannibals of the New Guinea swamps, who ate Michael Rockefeller.” Sidestepping the worship-or-trash the natives genres, Nelson actually seems to like the people and places most of us will never see. He easily weaves in threads of past trips to reveal clever, if unusual, connections: the preponderance of cow worship in Third World cultures, for example. His writing is sharpest when he’s on his own and least successful when recounting his travel with groups: The essay via a state-sponsored bus tour of China is pub banter, clever but tiring. He is otherwise generous with humour and spare with the superlatives, so when he got to the Baliem Valley in New Guinea and said the place was “knock-you- out beautiful”, I believed him. In the world of travel narrative, that’s no small feat. –Kathleen Buckley, Amazon.co.uk

“Get ready to laugh your way around the world with Let’s Get Lost. We’re lucky Craig Nelson made it through customs with his razor-sharp wit.” –Jane Wagner, author, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

“Why suffer the blinding headaches, dizziness and extreme nausea that comes with climbing 16,000 feet straight up the Andes in under six hours — especially when Craig Nelson has already gone to Machu Picchu for us? But ‘we must go for ourselves,’ he argues. Not just to this ancient Incan pilgrimage site, but also to the Tomb of Hatshepsut in Egypt, the Great Wall of China, India’s Ganges River, the Kenyan plain of Maasai Mara, and a host of other dangerous and offbeat places. Nelson knows he’s a white guy staring at the natives, and his gentle self-mockery makes him a most likeable tour guide. Add his knowledge of world history, anthropology and sociology, and a keen eye for the trappings of late monopoly capitalism — McDonald’s is everywhere; native Kenyans peddle Visa cards on American television — and the result is a wild summer ride that requires no safety belts.” –Emily Drabinski, Out

“Let’s Get Lost is a tour de force of travel and wonderful writing; a great book.” –Jane and Michael Stern, authors, The Encyclopedia of Pop Culture

“Nelson proves his main rule of the road: that he ‘can safely go anywhere in the world, and make real contact with people who are completely alien to me in their culture, in their language and in their civilization.’ At his best, his keen eye for detail captures those moments that offer escape from the dreaded ‘global homogenization’ that he sees almost everywhere else.” – Publisher’s Weekly

_____________________

When he turned fifty, my father ran away from home. He was a big Texan in a big Lincoln driving whichever way his mood turned, a man temporarily no longer responsible for a wife and a mother and a job and two kids, and whatever else was on his mind. Like almost all runaways, he ended up going back home after about a year of meandering, but I guess that wanderlust stays in the blood. Today, there’s nothing I like more than lighting out for the territories and running as far away from our world as possible . . . traveling to places where the airport windsock really is a sock.

There is another world, and only going there yourself reveals its life. I learned this on my first trip to a foreign country, when I was an obese pre-teen and my family decided to visit the border towns of Mexico. As we crossed the Rio Grande river, under the bridge was a mob of wet young men in their underpants, hopping up and down, shaking Dixie cups nailed to sticks, so that tourist would throw pennies at them. Then, in Matamoros, while my parents shopped at stalls filled with colorful piñatas and molded-jadeite Aztec calendars and other festive momentoes, I’d be approached by shadowy figures of all descriptions, and when I used my grade-school Spanish to pass on their offers of girl whores, they’d immediately counter by offering to set me up with boy whores. I wasn’t even shaving yet for chrissakes, but at that age it was in fact exactly the right thing to see and hear, since it was such an important message:

The world you know isn’t the only one;

in fact, maybe it’s not even the real world after all . . .

I’m not the Jon Krakauer “let’s climb Mount Everest for fun!” kind of guy; I’m a middle-class, pudgy white person, who grew up in the suburbs and spent twenty-five years thinking cigarettes were one of life’s greatest pleasures. Since I never met a meal I didn’t like, at plenty of times I’ve been the size not included in “one size fits all,” and to this day, I’m convinced that the best exercises to do are sit-ups because, in between, you get to lie down. If you’re not an Ethel Merman lookalike (and she’s dead), you’re easily in better physical shape than I am, and probably a lot braver, too.

On my trips, though, I’ve been threatened by an orangutan in Borneo . . . taught American dance steps to Stone Age cannibals in New Guinea . . . climbed a mountain to get an aerial view of Machu Picchu . . . taken psychoactive pharmaceuticals with a Jivaro shaman in the middle of the Amazon . . . gone hunting with the last of the African Bushmen . . . had a run-in with the People’s Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square . . . seen the total eclipse of the sun from the roof of an eighteenth-century Indian palace . . . and stalked gorillas through the montane forests of Uganda.

I’ve held hands while walking with a Maasai through his Kenyan lands, as well as with a sign-language adept orangutan and her nursing baby on a tour of the Borneo jungle. It is one thing to gaze, in real life and in their own home, on the upturned face of a young gorilla, and it is quite a different and remarkable experience when they gaze back at you . . .

You go as a sightseer, but you come home as the sight seen.

Whenever I tell my family where I’m off to next, in fact, my mother always has one question: “Why on earth would you want to go there?”