I remember the exact moment this book began. I was sitting in a café in Saigon (sounds glamorous – it wasn't). It was April 1993 and I was chatting with other like-minded backpackers from Canada, Australia and Germany. We were revelling in our self-importance and congratulating ourselves that we got to Vietnam before the other travellers spoiled it. Embarrassingly, I think we honestly felt that we were the first Westerners in Saigon since the war ended. In any case, I wanted to trade a novel I had finished – Milan Kundera's The Joke – and an American fellow offered me Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania in return. I had never read a travelogue before, but I eagerly exchanged books. I thought Theroux would inspire me on my impending solo journey through Asia and Africa. It was, and I stick to this judgement, one of the worst books I have ever read – boring, nasty and offensive in equal measure. The problem was that I didn't have a critical language to express my distaste. Intuitively, I knew this wasn't just a bad book; there was something wrong with this book and something wrong with travel writing in general. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that there was also something wrong with my own rite of passage as a smug Western backpacker. Over a decade later, this is the result.