Book Review

The Gringo Trail

Mark Mann

Summersdale Publishers 1999

I am not going to pull any punches with my review of The Gringo Trail authored by Mark Mann. Despite being highly acclaimed by many in travel circles, ultimately I can only rate this book in the ‘average’ scale.

The title is slightly misleading if you are buying the book for South American gringo trail travel tips. The author and his companions travel mainly in the Andean north of the continent and do not set foot in popular tourist trail countries of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay or Paraguay. So don’t expect to read any tips on what to see in Patagonia!

The book is an easy-to-read travelogue of three worn out drug users from London who decide to travel to South America… and consume more drugs. The author’s account of what it is supposedly like to backpack in South America at times borders on fictional embellishment. There is little meaningful interaction with South American locals, except for power vomiting onto a helpless schoolgirl at an Ecuadorian street festival.

We follow this travel adventure through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia before the journey reaches a metaphoric STOP sign. Instead of continuing south, the author backtracks thousands of kilometres over the exact same route towards Colombia. Some spectacular places in each country are visited but so many South American highlights are ignored or dismissed through poor trip planning and wasted hours on buses.

The obvious natural wonderment the book overlooked was the Salar de Uyuni in southern Boliva. The author takes us to Potosi, a town that is within a comparative short train ride distance to Uyuni and its world famous salt pans. This spectacle is dismissed and the journey takes us in the opposite direction returning to La Paz, also bypassing along the way a chance to visit the beautiful colonial town of Sucre. It is confusing travel behaviour atypical of gringo trail backpacking routes. If you follow in this book’s footsteps you will be chasing your tail throughout the Andes.

To give the author some credit where due. His vivid descriptions of Andes landscapes and settings brought back great memories. The background research of the Incas in early chapters is admittedly exceptional and handily referenced to explore the topic further. The author certainly knows how to tell a descriptive story, in the style of sitting with a beer at your local bar chatting with mates. Though the best yarns in this book are mainly the travel anecdotes that the author has ‘borrowed’ from other gringo backpackers he encounters along the trail.

Any real substance the book has unravels as the author continually falls back on descriptions of immature drug use episodes either in London or South America. I use the word ‘immature’ because the three featured travel companions are well beyond their years of admitted university inspired recreational drug use. In one account we are shared the perverse story of what happens when you feed a Doberman dog LSD at a London drug party. Such an account is pointless, except if you are specifically writing a book to boast about recreational drug use adventures.

The author was quoted in an interview as saying “the drugs are only a small part of the book”1. I must beg to differ. Flicking back through the book, I counted well over thirty separate descriptions of drug use episodes involving either the author, his companions, locals or other travellers. It becomes tiresome to read about another joint being lit, another cocaine story or another hallucinogenic trip.

I can assure future South American travellers reading this review, that the majority of gringo backpackers I met did not travel around the continent on drug binges. Most of us gringos want to see the sights, meet some locals, and if we have a good time it is usually by consuming vast quantities of tasty local beers… as boring as that must sound to Mark Mann.

SPOILER WARNING: If you are planning to read the book, the paragraphs below will give away the book ending.

The book provides an unexpected dark ending; an account of the drowning of one of the author’s UK travel companions on a Colombian beach. I felt sick in the stomach reading what unfolded.

The author justifies at length his prior warnings about the dangerous beach conditions and his own swimming inability to assist the drowning companion, who was only swimming 20 metres from shore. This drowning account was very real to me. Two of my own family members have assisted in rescuing drowning persons on Australian beaches on separate occasions. Although poor swimmers, my family members still did everything they could to assist and on both occasions they saved the day.

Tragically, in this drowning scenario the author stands on the beach hoping his friend can save himself. When the struggling companion ultimately succumbs to a large wave crashing over him, the author does not call for help to local Colombians who were playing frisbee nearby on the beach, "oblivious to the drama that had just unfolded a few yards away from them."2 Did the author assume these local Colombians, if approached, would be unlikely to assist his friend simply because he was a gringo? From the written account, an effort is made to retrieve the body when it was all too late. Only the author can defend his own action or inaction in the crisis. Readers will make up their own minds.

In the book conclusion the author decides that, despite the drowning death of his friend, it was still “better to carry on travelling”3 to Guatemala. I don’t think I know many travellers who in the same circumstances would still want to continue travelling after watching their friend drown! I also don’t know many travellers who would then want to write a book describing the detailed binge drug taking habits of the same deceased friend, who has no direct right of review or reply of the content. There is no indication in the book whether the deceased friend’s family approved the book content prior to publishing?

Finishing the last page, I wondered what was the purpose of this book… the author travels to South America, visits four Andean countries, consumes a variety of drugs, watches his friend drown, keeps travelling, then decides to write a book about it? Maybe putting pen to paper was the cathartic experience that the author needed to deconstruct his blurred travel account.

Unfortunately The Gringo Trail is likely to become a cult-classic inspiring young recreational drug using gringos to flock to South America to follow in Mark Mann’s mythical footsteps… if that is your scene, just make sure you don’t end up in a not so friendly South American prison!