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By Spencer James Conway
I enjoyed Spencer’s first book. It followed his motorcycle travels around Africa including many dangerous hair raising adventures. However his second book promoted as being the story of his motorcycle journey around South America is not actually that, nor is it very good.
At the end of this book Spencer says words to the effect ‘I suppose you are wondering where the rest of my travels in South America are – well I have omitted half and that content will be in a upcoming third book’. Spencer himself neatly just summarized for me what is wrong with his book.
What you get is half the chapters being about moto travel and half about Spencer’s childhood and other stories which I found mostly boring. Compounding my disappointment is the missing chapters are of the countries in South America I most wanted to read about.
There are a few interesting chapters although I have a big question mark regarding what Spencer has written about the countries in this book. You see I am just back from Colombia which is a beautiful country one which I recommend to anyone to visit. Spencer describes Colombia as a shit hole. He writes about staying in street full of prostitutes and drug users and being robbed by children. I’m sure there is some bad areas of Bogota but I think Spencer deliberately sought out to find the seedy.
Colombia is very affordable so there was no reason for Spencer to stay in the shittiest part of town. I started having some doubts about him and that casts doubts now about what he wrote in his last book. How much is true and how much might be just sensationalism.
If you did same in every country you could describe many rather poorly just as Spencer does. But Bogota looks like any other countries capital city, modern office blocks, apartments, coffee shops and people driving modern cars to shopping malls that sell global designer brands. Away from Bogota Colombia is a country with pretty decent infrastructure and nice hotels and beautiful historic towns which I found to be clean and safe.
Spencer’s description of Peru sounds pretty woeful too but now I am wondering well perhaps he has again chosen to talk about the worst aspects which do not reflect the country as a whole and then I start to wonder well is there anything in this book that is a balanced description of the places visited. I doubt it.
If all the ride had been included in this book it might have turned out to be something good albeit with some inaccuracies however as it stands I cannot recommend it. I will not be buying his third book to get the missing chapters.
Sounds like some woke hollywood move to sell more crap