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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’. That is the first thing I disliked.
You get 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 set out to find the seedy or is being inventive in his account.
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 of his adventures in Africa is real and how much might be ‘creative writing’.
If you look for the worst in every country you could describe many rather poorly just as Spencer does. But and Bogota and Medellin look like most countries big cities, modern office blocks, apartments, coffee shops and people driving modern cars to shopping malls that sell designer brands. Away from Bogota Colombia is a country with pretty decent infrastructure and nice hotels and beautiful historic towns, all of which I found to be clean and safe.
Spencer’s description of Peru sounds pretty woeful too but many people have been there and reported on the whole it’s not like Spencer has written so I am wondering has he again again chosen to cherry pick the worst aspects to talk about which do not reflect the country as a whole. I then start to wonder well is there anything in this book that is a balanced or a honest description of the places he visited. Was his last book also an exaggeration.
If all the ride had been included in this book that might have been revealing because if he described every country in South America as dirty, seedy and dangerous then the reader would be able to call him out and say well you are a liar. Maybe he realised and that is why it is split. I won’t be buying his 3rd book to find that out.
Sounds like some woke hollywood move to sell more crap