This week, I’m going to be discussing Audible’s production of Dom Joly’s The Hezbollah Hiking Club – a funny, heartwarming travel book.
The Hezbollah Hiking Club
The Author
To people of a certain age, Dom Joly is always going to be the prankster of the Channel 4 Trigger Happy TV series, screaming ‘Hello?’ into a huge mobile phone in a library, or deathly quiet museum, and stunning those around him. In more recent years, however, he has become a fantastic travel writer, particularly by coining the idea of ‘dark tourism’ – long before the concept was nicked by a certain streaming channel, who shall remain nameless.
I have thoroughly enjoyed Dom’s previous travelogues to such offbeat tourist destinations as North Korea and Chernobyl but, whilst still an unusual choice for a holiday, The Hezbollah Hiking Club turns out to be much more personal.
This is because it transpires that Dom Joly was actually born in Beirut, living there until he was 18. He lived through the civil war, and, in a fact, which his alma mater generally prefers to obfuscate, went to school with a certain Osama Bin Laden. At the age of seven he was sent to an English boarding school, where he would spend term times, returning to his war-torn home in the school holidays. Unsurprisingly, he describes it as a somewhat schizophrenic existence.
When Dom’s parents divorced, he moved permanently to the UK, becoming a diplomat and a political journalist, before eventually finding great fame as the man with the giant mobile phone.
The Lebanon Mountain Trail
Despite having returned to Lebanon only twice since his move to the UK, Dom reads about an attempt to encourage tourism in the long-suffering country – a revival of the Lebanon Mountain Trail – and feels inspired. This, he explains, is a hiking trail that runs, ‘from the Syrian border in the north of Lebanon, along the spine of the country’s mountain range all the way to the Israeli border in the south.’ It is a walk, which takes the average, accomplished rambler thirty days to complete.
Dom immediately decides that he must hike the trail in 2018, the year of his 50th birthday, and invites two friends along. His choice of friends makes for most of the hilarious moments in the book. The threesome are all gloriously politically incorrect, seem to lack any basic hiking skills, possess only a rudimentary level of fitness and, often to the exasperation of their guides, would generally prefer to walk down, rather than up, the mountains.
Essentially this is a male-bonding adventure that just so happens to take place right in the middle of one of the most violent political hotspots of recent times.
Narration
Regular readers of my blog will know that I enjoy it when authors read their own books but this one is particularly fun, as Dom is riotous company to keep. His evisceration of his friends’ pomposity and his honesty about his own failings is also refreshing.
The Hezbollah Hiking Club is laugh out loud funny in places but the nostalgia and love for his homeland, which Dom expresses, also adds a certain poignancy to the proceedings. Dom is a gifted comedian and you will be glad that you joined him on the trek!