Captain Jack's Basic Navigation Book

There's a certain breed of travelogue I enjoy, in which some intrepid person sets out on an outlandish adventure that I would never take myself, but am eager to experience from the armchair. This book, about a Dutchman who drives a Mercedes from Amsterdam to Benin to sell it, fits my parameters perfectly. It's a short and sweet detailing of the trials and tribulations involved (none of which should be surprising, from the con-artist guides, to the bribe-demanding border guards, to the inevitable breakdowns) in driving an almost 20-year-old car with something like 100,000 miles on the odometer across Morocco, the Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, and finally, Benin.

The book has a little bit of everything, from the author's semi mid-life crisis, to an examination of the ideas of form, function, and quality as expressed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Western aid to Africa, the quest for authenticity in tourism, and old-fashioned descriptive travel narrative. The underlying premise is an interesting one: a used car that would be destined for the scrap heap in Western Europe, due to the relative cost of repairing it vs. the overall value, can be sold at a profit in Africa, where the labor cost to repair such a car is minimal and the need for transportation is high. There is, in fact, a booming trade in such scrapheap cars, and along the way, the author finds himself in one of the continent's largest auto-repair zones, a sprawling industrial enclave in Ghana.

At times the book reads like a depressing catalogue of African cliches (the border guards and other corrupt officials), the smug European expats, the slimy middlemen, the inevitable coup -- however, there's enough else of interest to keep it interesting, and the tone is generally pretty light. Interspersed are brief chapters in which the author tracks down the previous owners of his car in order to discover its history, which are interesting, but a little too intrusive. I pretty much enjoyed the book as a light read, but was left with a sour taste at the end when the author's note reveals that the "trip" described in the book was actually portions of several trips woven together, and that he had travel partners never mentioned anywhere in the narrative. I don't necessarily have a problem with that approach (putting the "creative" in creative non-fiction), but it could have been expressed right up front, instead of hidden in the back, where it cheapens the entire story.