cover image Gone Troppo: Hot Babes. Warm Weather. Cold Beer. Paradise!

Gone Troppo: Hot Babes. Warm Weather. Cold Beer. Paradise!

Stu Lloyd, Stuart Lloyd. Monsoon Books, $15.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-981-05-4833-9

Travel writer Lloyd chronicles his journey from South Africa to the Cook Islands, making stops at tropical wonderlands including India, Hawaii, Mexico and Costa Rica. Lloyd's objective in each place is essentially the same, ""to go for a drink or nineteen,"" and bring us along. Lloyd is a proud drinker and an unapologetic sexist, reducing nearly every woman he encounters to a bare minimum of anatomy and color, such as Erika in Costa Rica, a""bounteously bosomed beauty in a yellow shirt."" When Lloyd does get out of the bar, he offers vivid, compelling descriptions of the sites he encounters, particularly India. But the author often treads recklessly the fine line between humor and racism: ""He was that sort of smarmy, gold-teeth-a-glinting Indian,"" the women of South Africa ""had the biggest butts I'd ever seen in my life,"" the Chinese are ""not known for being able to say 'round and round the ragged rock the rugged rascal ran.'"" Perhaps worse is that the joke is never on Lloyd, who must have encountered some who found his blustery mock-Colonialism tiresome. Though funny and absorbing, Lloyd's strong points may or may not be worth enduring his casual stereotyping, and this book should not be recommended or given without advance knowledge of a reader's limits.