I posted about this company
jetlag travel a while ago when they had put out their faux guide to Molvania.
I actually got my hands on a copy of Molvania and laughed myself silly. I just thought that this was such a brilliant
idea, and I was looking forward to stories about people who bought the guide thinking it was real and perhaps even
tried to book a flight there. You know that’s gonna happen…probably in a red state somewhere.
Anyway, the good folks at jetlag travel have another book out, this one about a small nation called
Phaic Tan (get it?). The country is said to be “an overwhelming
explosion of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and strange colonic movements,” and where “traffic police wear face masks
but surgeons rarely do”. The beauty of this concept is not just the concept. The beauty is in the detail, and these
guides, even though completely fake, have gone into the kind of detail that would make some guidebooks seethe with
envy. For example, the authors make up dishes in the “cuisine section”, and mention one particular dish called
Nergak, which the book says “is a spicy fish sauce
widely added to food throughout Phaic Tan. It is made at a massive processing plant in Pattaponga, one of the biggest
factories in Asia, said to be the only man-made structure that can be smelt from the moon.”
This is gut-splitting stuff.