What do You think about The Hotel On The Roof Of The World: From Miss Tibet To Shangri La (2003)?
This book is hilarious and full of wacky people in a strange place. (My favorite kind of situation). I read this in Africa when I was touring around Namibia by myself. I gave the book to a girl on my cheapo safari. We were bouncing around in this jeep thing and she managed to keep her nose in the book without throwing up. I could hear her laughing the entire time she was reading it. Since then, I regularly give this book as a gift to people I know who like to travel. It is hard to find. But everyone always loves it.
—Adele Levine
Le Sueur's account of the several years he spent working at a highly dysfunctional hotel in Tibet will be enjoyed by readers interested in visiting the country and has some pretty funny moments. It's been dubbed Faulty Towers in Tibet by many. But for me this is, in part, its problem.While Le Sueur comes to understand Tibet, he seems to get to know few Tibetans well. After all, he is working in a hotel populated by an ever-changing contingent of tourists and manned largely by foreigners.Le Sueur gives a great account of what it might be like to run a business while dealing with the whims of the Communist Party of China, in a politically charged atmosphere. This is sometimes interesting, but can become tedious to read about with lots of red tape and random, arbitrary decisions.I find commenting on the short comings of non-fiction travel writing difficult, as it seems a pretty tall order to expect the author to bend the truth into some sort of narrative structure, when life is in fact often haphazard and meaningless by nature. But for me this book did feel like a lot of random occurrences strung together, and as a result I found myself fairly indifferent to whether I actually finished it or not.
—Dominique
I don't read as many travel books as I always intend to. Those I have read I have tended to really enjoy, and on the whole this was no exception. However this is much less a book about Tibet and it's people as it is about the least likely Holiday Inn in the world. Alec Le Sueur introduces us to the peculiar people who work there, visit there and the hilarious fawlty toweresque chaos that comes with them. Le Sueur seems to write with real affection for a place he spent a good deal of time in, he pokes gentle fun at some of the more bizarre misunderstandings that stem from vastly differing cultural differences, but is never cruel. It is quite deliberate - Le Sueur explains in his epilogue - that he hasn't delved deeper into the cultural political and religious aspects of Tibet - there are many other books that do that. This is therefore a fairly light, entertaining read about a hotel in one of the unlikliest places on earth.
—Ali
