Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel

by Suzanne Roberts

Both a memoir in travel essays and an anti-guidebook, Bad Tourist takes us across four continents to fifteen countries, showing us what not to do when traveling. A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself.                Throughout her travels Roberts tries hard not to be a bad tourist, but owing to her cultural blind spots, things don’t always go as planned. Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises—both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.  

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays

272 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2020

About the author

Suzanne Roberts is the author of 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer (UNP, 2026), PEN award longlisted Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (UNP, 2022), the award-winning travel essay collection Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four books of poems. Named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, National Geographic, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Normal School, The Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California