Taking the backpacker guidebooks for a ride

Somewhere near Romania and Bulgaria is the small, land-locked, seldom-visited nation of Molvania, a “land untouched by modern dentistry,” as the guidebook says. It has a constitution that guarantees the right to bear a grudge, a national anthem sung to the tune of “What a Feeling” from “Flashdance,” and a founding father named Szlonko Busjbusj, affectionately known as “Bu-Bu.”

It has Europe’s only cobblestone autobahn, a capital city named Lutenblag (known for hosting the 1998 World Petanque Championships), an alpine region ready to welcome winter-sports lovers with miles of fully mine-swept trails, and a traditional central valley where elderly women spit in strangers’ faces to ward off evil spirits.

As for tourist facilities, you’ll find Lutenblag’s top-flight Rojal Palatz Hotjl, overlooking a particle board factory, and a revolving restaurant that really revolves, if slowly, because of frequent power shortages.

Travelers who love unspoiled, off-the-beaten-track places should know about Molvania. Just don’t pack your blow dryer. The electrical current there is unique, running on 37 volts, a figure chosen with the help of numerology.

In fact, don’t pack your bags at all.

Molvania exists only in the fertile imaginations of Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, three Australian humorists who wrote and produced the 2000 movie “The Dish” about a rural hamlet in Australia with a parabolic reflector that helps NASA put Neil Armstrong on the moon. Their “Jet Lag Travel Guide to Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry,” was published last year in Australia. It’s just out in Britain and is to be published in the U.S. in September by Overlook Press.

The three were inspired to write the Molvania guide while traveling in Portugal, backpacker-style, 10 years ago, when everything they wanted to see was under renovation, Sitch said in a recent interview with the Guardian newspaper. “One of us pretended to read from a guidebook -- ‘some of the scaffolding dates back to the 16th century’ -- and that’s where the idea was born,” he is quoted as saying in the March article.

Anyone who reads guidebooks, whether for pleasure or necessity, will find the book a hoot. It gets repetitive, as satires often do, but it makes you laugh because the authors are familiar with the subject they’ve chosen to skewer: backpacker guidebooks, such as those from Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Moon and Let’s Go.

The book apes these in every detail: a silly chart of Molvania’s political structure, bold print calling attention to important facts, fake author bios, a list of forthcoming titles such as “Surviving Moustaschistan” and “Sailing the Syphollos Straits” and even the occasional admission of error in an earlier edition, as when we’re advised that the Jhahmim restaurant in Lutenblag features Lebanese, not lesbian, food.

Along the way, it levels some serious criticism at backpacker guidebooks. With such outrageous statements as, “Molvania prides itself on the fact [that] ... most of its gypsies have been successfully driven abroad or incarcerated,” it pokes fun at the increasing political correctness of travel guides.

Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet, thought the book was funny.

“If it was making fun of LP ... we’re a legitimate target,” he said. “I have occasional outbursts about our writers adopting a holier-than-thou attitude, which was perfectly mirrored in ‘Molvania.’ ”

But BBC News reported some people think the Molvania send-up supports cliches about Eastern Europe’s most impoverished states.

Richard Trillo, a spokesman and author for London-based Rough Guides, said, “I found the Molvania book offensive, with no redeeming features. It’s not funny; it’s boring and repetitive, with the same predictable jokes stereotyping Eastern Europe. And what stinks most is the way local people have been derided through the unacknowledged use of their photos.” (The cover shot of the Australian edition, for instance, shows a gap-toothed old man in a furry hat, unidentified and grinning broadly.)

The Molvania guide isn’t the first send-up of a small country in Eastern Europe. There was “Why Come to Slaka?” by Malcolm Bradbury in the 1980s and, before that, the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup,” set in the loopy little Balkan nation of Freedonia.

Nor do we ever learn which country it’s aiming at in particular. Perhaps the true object of satire is Moldova, east of Romania, liberated in 1991 from the Soviet Union only to elect a communist president in 2001. It’s still occupied by Russian troops east of the Dneister River and is one of the poorest nations in Europe.

That’s enough to make anyone stop laughing.

I’m no fan of political correctness, which strikes me as death in travel writing, homogenizing and dumbing-down, or the tendency in backpacker guidebooks to extol the virtues of virtueless places. This is precisely what the authors of the Molvania guide are trying to say in a funny way. But maybe the book misses the most deserving object of satire: travelers who follow these books mindlessly, clustering together in backpacker hubs such as Kuta Beach on Bali and McCleod Ganj in northern India, thinking they are seeing the world, but looking at reflections of only themselves.

“The Jet Lag Travel Guide to Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry” is available from www.amazon.co.uk and www.mcgills.com.au.

Susan Spano’s “Postcards From Paris” are posted at www. latimes.com/susanspano. She welcomes comments at postcards@latimes.com but regrets that she cannot respond to them individually.