Product Description

The First and Only Guide to Molvania

Molvania, birthplace of the polka and whooping cough, has often been overlooked as a tourist destination but thanks to this fully up-dated Jetlag Travel Guide the keen traveler can now enjoy one of central Europe’s best-kept secrets. Everything you need to know about this unique nation – ‘a land untouched by modern dentistry’ – is here, including:
Useful phrases: Sprufki Doh Craszko? (What is that smell?)
Eating Out: As a rule, eating out in Molvania is quite cheap … but in some larger cities you may be expected to pay extra for a waiter with a moustache.
Accommodation: Hotjl Palfvi is a 250-year-old Carmelite convent that has been tastefully restored with a real eye for period detail. For example, each room features a large wooden crucifix that opens to reveal a fully-stocked mini-bar.
Culture: The national anthem was chosen in 1987 as part of a competition, sung to the tune of ‘What a Feeling’ from Flashdance, the third verse is generally considered optional.’

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75498 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Bill Bryson
'Brilliantly original and very, very funny.’

Ben Schott
‘This book took me straight back to my holiday in Molvania: I intend to sue.’

Nigel Tisdall, Daily Telegraph
'Skilfully mimicking the everything-is-brilliant tone of government tourist boards, Molvania delivers a deliciously wicked kick in the shins.'

Customer Reviews

It actually hurts to read this book
Cynical, unreconstructed, venomous and decidedly un-PC. And that's just me. Having endured years of, admittedly enjoyable, Lonely Planet and Rough Guide- guided travel, the jetlag series has come at exactly the right time for me and anyone else vaguely embarassed about how seriously they take Tony Wheeler and his imitators.

Whilst other forthcoming books in the series include Surviving Moustachistan, and Getting Round the Tofu islands, Molvania is the first and is hilariously funny.
Open this book on any page and you'll find invaluable travel tips for the most adventurous traveller - from avoiding the colonic irrigation inducing bidets - to the frank apologies about errors in previous editions:Hotel Jakvekz was mistakenly decsribed as appealing. It is infact 'appalling'. The photos are fantastic as well.

Buy it. Just don't go there.

Buy it. Now....Why haven't you bought it yet?
This was in the "Bestselling Non-fiction" section of a book shop - I still wonder whether the staff put it there because they didn't get the joke, or because they did. Once you've read even the inside cover of this book, the parody becomes plainly (and wonderfully) obvious.

Molvania is a land where the trams manage to run (for certain values of 'run') on gas, where the encroaching McDonalds' products must by law contain 12% local cabbage (don't ask about the milkshakes), and where the local language carries a health warning in case of laryngeal damage.

A wonderful book, with several more like it planned - they should be worth waiting for.

A tongue-in-cheek travel guide like no other
If you are like me and are somewhat addicted to travel guides, be they Lonely Planet, Rough Guides or something similar, you will greatly appreciate "Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry".

Written by a team of Australian comedians - the same men behind the films "The Dish" and "The Castle" and the current-affairs mockumentary series "Frontline" - this is a spoof travel guide for a fictional nation located somewhere in the Baltic region of the former USSR.

In the best travel guide tradition it provides a wealth of advice on places to stay, the best places to eat, the sights to see and intriguing little snippets about the country's social and cultural history, all interspersed with amusing photographs and illustrations.

By turns completely realistic and laugh-out loud funny, it is one of the most entertaining reads I have had in a long while. On every single page there is something that will grab your funny bone and have you chuckling uncontrollably. For this reason, my advice is not to read it in public. It's also not advisable to read it while you have a friend in the room because you will spend all your time annoying them by saying, "hey, listen to this", as you regale them with insights from the book, and then, before you know it, you will be reading the whole thing out loud in between bouts of laughter.

Some random examples to prove my point:

"The famous statue of Helmzlog III (the 'Liberator of Lutenblag') stands in the centre of the busy main square, holding aloft a sword and what was for years assumed to be a shield, but has recently turned out - upon closer examination - to be the grille from a Fiat 350." (Page 58)

And:

"Many visitors will no doubt have heard of the Gyrorik Art Gallery, an institution that made headlines a few years back when its curator Vbrec Mzecjenj suspected a Rembrandt landscape in the gallery's possession may, in fact, have been painted over a rare, and far more valuable, self-portrait of the Dutch master. Under the curator's guidance a painstaking restoration process was commenced in which the outer layer of the painting was delicately stripped away. The work took almost 16 months and eventually revealed nothing underneath. With the original work destroyed, all that remained of value was the frame which now holds a copy of Mr Mzecjenj's letter of resignation." (Page 139)

And if that wasn't enough, my favourite section of the entire book is not related to the actual travel writing but to the short biographies assigned to each of the fictional authors who have created the book. For example:

"Trudi Dennes: Trudi has lived and worked in Japan for over 10 years. She now works in the department of classical history at Tokyo University. Trudi has never visited Molvania and was assigned to this guide due to a staffing error." (Page 6)

My only quibble with this very clever and comical book is that it gets a bit "samey" after awhile. It's definitely not one to read cover to cover, but one to dip in and out of over an extended period of time. It's perfect light reading to lift your mood and bring a smile to your dial should you need one.