Review: Urban Safari

If your idea of a proper vacation involves a sun lounger, a suspiciously blue cocktail and seven uninterrupted days of doing absolutely nothing, Urban Safari is probably not for you.

This is a love letter to cities. The big, loud, dirty, complicated kind of cities. Places where the interesting stuff tends to happen several blocks away from wherever the tourist office tells you to go.

Bobo Karlsson has spent some thirty years collecting stories, details and presumably a formidable number of bar receipts from cities around the world. I understand the obsession. There’s something irresistible about wandering through an unfamiliar city with no particular plan beyond seeing what’s around the next corner.

I’ve visited most of the cities covered in the book, and many of them have been photographed, documented and written about to death. Yet Karlsson still manages to dig beneath the familiar postcard surface and find the odd corners, strange characters and overlooked details that make these places worth exploring in the first place.

The chapters on São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were particular favorites. Karlsson heads beyond the polished neighborhoods and obvious attractions, dragging the reader through remote districts, questionable drinking establishments and the sort of places where a sensible travel guide might politely suggest you reconsider your life choices. Which naturally is where things become interesting.

More surprising was Stockholm. I’ve been there countless times and assumed I knew the place reasonably well. Apparently not. Karlsson manages to uncover details and stories I’d somehow missed during all those visits, a useful reminder that familiarity is often just another form of laziness.

There is admittedly a lot of name-dropping. At times the book becomes a relentless parade of restaurants, bars, hotels and people, some of which will mean absolutely nothing unless you happen to be a hardened local, an obsessive traveler or someone with an unusually encyclopedic knowledge of drinking establishments. But that’s also part of the charm.

Urban Safari isn’t really a conventional travel guide. It’s more like spending an evening drinking with someone who has been everywhere, remembers everything and refuses to stop telling you about that little bar in São Paulo you really should have visited fifteen years ago. And somehow, against your better judgment, you keep listening.

This may not be the ideal book for a lazy afternoon on the beach. Then again, neither is a city. Grab a copy. Then go get lost.