Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks
Read: April 2010

A final Dahab read that was mostly devoured on the bus home. We decided at the end of this break to get the public bus back as flights were getting too expensive So with five hours of reading time ahead of me I got stuck into this (journey was longer than five hours, but darkness led to looking out of the window rather than trying to squint at the text).
You can't go wrong with Tony Hawks to be honest. He's just a normal guy who does random things and writes about them. Now there are a few of those around (Danny Wallace, Dave Gorman etc) but Hawks is surely the original. He decides (in a bet of course) to try and find the Moldovan football team and play them all at tennis. The story is fun and entertaining but as it's Moldova he's exploring you get to find out more than say he was travelling across America (although reading about all the arse-end-of-nowhere towns that DG visited was pretty cool). The book was written a fair few years ago and so Tony seems to have bagged himself the only translator and tourist visa to get there. Getting around is fun and reminds me of Cairo as he walks pot-holed streets in the dark to get home. He struggles with public transport, boarder bureaucracy and jobsworth officials. Reminds me of Egypt again, but with a Eastern Europe flavour.