Review: Rule no 5: No sex on the bus

Brian Thacker is an Australian tour guide and travel writer, which means he has willingly chosen a profession involving passports, hangovers, questionable judgment and large groups of people who have temporarily abandoned whatever common sense they possessed back home.

Rule No 5 chronicles his day job of herding tourists around Europe on a bus. This may sound like the sort of occupation normally reserved for people paying off some terrible karmic debt, but Thacker manages to turn it into something considerably more entertaining.

There are expeditions into the strip clubs of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. There’s the impressive achievement of mistaking Freiburg’s enormous Münster for another church. There’s a determined search through Florence for a gelateria promising “orgasmic flavours” and “sinfully rich meringue”, because apparently ordinary ice cream is no longer enough once you’ve spent several weeks trapped on a bus with forty smelly strangers. He even finds time to hassle David Hasselhoff. What more could you reasonably demand from literature?

I do have one small problem with the book. Everything is dialed to eleven. Everyone is drinking, everyone is bonking, somebody is inevitably doing something monumentally stupid, and this apparently continues more or less uninterrupted for a month. Europe begins to resemble one enormous mobile frat party with occasional stops for Renaissance architecture. However, I suppose it wouldn’t be half as funny without all the sex, drugs and German folk music.

Realism probably isn’t the point. Nobody buys a book about a European party tour hoping for thoughtful passages about motorway service stations, sensible bedtimes and forty people quietly admiring the architectural significance of a cathedral. Without the excess, you’d just have a bus.

And perhaps that’s the charm of it. Rule No. 5 presents Europe as seen through the slightly bloodshot eyes of people who have spent too many hours together, consumed too much alcohol and lost track of which country they woke up in.

If the idea of cramming yourself onto a faintly suspicious-smelling bus with forty strangers, surrendering control of your itinerary and having absolutely no idea what fresh disaster waits around the next corner sounds appealing, this is probably your book.