Armchair travel is one of the reasons I love reading.
My husband loves watching travel shows or actually traveling (well, I love actually traveling as well, but that costs a lot more money that armchair travel). In fact, we’re traveling this week, visiting the South Island.
And while I’ve travelled to some unusual and exotic foreign locations in my reading, most of them were just that: Exotic. Foreign. Foreign and exotic is different, but it’s not strange. And many of these foreign and exotic locations are places I’ve either visited (e.g. Israel) or would like to visit (e.g. Iceland).
Calling armchair travelers: What's the strangest destination you've ever travelled to in a book? Is that somewhere you'd like to visit in real life? #BookishQuestion #BookWorm Click To TweetThen I remembered Betrayed by Jeanette Windle. Windle is a brilliant writer who loves writing about unusual and exotic settings such as South America or the Middle East. But Betrayed had the strangest setting:
A rubbish dump in Guatemala City.
Here’s the book description:
Fires smolder endlessly below the dangerous surface of Guatemala City’s municipal dump. Deadlier fires seethe beneath the tenuous calm of a nation recovering from brutal civil war. Anthropologist Vicki Andrews is researching Guatemala’s “garbage people” when she stumbles across a human body. Curiosity turns to horror as she uncovers no stranger, but an American environmentalist—Vicki’s only sister, Holly.
With authorities dismissing the death as another street crime, Vicki begins tracing Holly’s last steps, a pilgrimage leading from slum squalor to the breathtaking and endangered cloud forests of the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere. But every unraveled thread raises more questions. What betrayal connects Holly’s murder, the recent massacre of a Mayan village, and the long-ago deaths of Vicki’s own parents?
Nor is Vicki the only one demanding answers. Before her search reaches its startling end, the conflagration has spilled across international borders to threaten an American administration and the current war on terror. With no one turning out to be who they’d seemed, who can Vicki trust and who should she fear?
Yes, that’s definitely the strangest—and most foreign—location I can think of. And one I have no desire to visit in real life. I’ll stick with my armchair travel, thank you.
