THE LONG HITCH HOME.
By Jamie Maslin. Skyhorse Publishing. $24.95.

Jamie Maslin once set himself a whimsically eccentric, logistically complicated and physically exhausting task. In 800 rides, through 19 countries, he attempted to hitchhike from Hobart to London. Lots of Tasmanians of my generation took that same route, with even more passionate commitment than Maslin, with the same sad conviction that they were returning "home", but usually by the soft paths of aircraft seats or ship's berths rather than beginning from the side of a road.

Actually, Maslin cribbed at the start, cadging a lift on a yacht from Hobart, abandoning "downy pillows" and his love's "curly locks" to sail past the "unblemished turquoise" of Wineglass Bay, then up to Sydney Harbour. Hobart was merely a staging point; Maslin's girlfriend's family lived there. Maslin permitted himself (reasonably enough) other interludes by sea, as well as a pedantic but understandable exemption from having to hitch through cities.

Hobart did provide Maslin with an excuse for describing his trek in terms which resemble Ishmael's self-justification at the start of Moby-Dick. For Maslin, travel offered an antidote to stagnation and monopoly. "Within the hitch was life itself". The act of standing still with your thumb extended here becomes "the travel equivalent of a jolt from a defibrillator". Adventure and exploration are goods and ends in themselves, as Maslin morphs occasionally into Jack Kerouac in his On the Road.

Surely, though, the joy of hitchhiking is not in the trip itself but in the wonderfully bizarre assortment of other eccentrics driving the cars, buses and trucks. On his way to Dubbo, for instance, Maslin was picked up by a couple, intimately close friends who have nonetheless resolved that it would "be too weird to root now". They ingested crystal meth through purloined straws, but seemed otherwise harmless. Despite that couple, Maslin's section on Australia (Uluru and Darwin especially) is a bit cliched and obvious. When he abandoned our shores, his irony sharpened and his sensitivity deepened.

Before leaving Australia, but more emphatically in South East Asia, Maslin juxtaposes polemic with travelogue. From his perspective, these polemics amount to tales of perfidy: Suharto in 1965, Timor in 1975, the Pathet Lao, the US bombing of Cambodia, and more. These segments of potted history seem to presume that readers will not know the history, have not read accounts of the events concerned, and may not have formed divergent views,

The book is stronger when Maslin is back on his feet, cajoling drivers into offering lifts, as many as 32 rides during one day in central Java. At one stop along the way, he turned into a corner-man in a Thai boxing contest; that is a smart and funny interlude. At another, Maslin trudged through snow and cold up a mountain to view Shipton's lost arch; that is the most lyrical moment in his journey.

The author of a travel book cannot really masquerade as an innocent abroad. Innocence is agreeable, even helpful, in the form of curiosity, openness to peculiar ideas and odd folk, and joy in the natural world. Innocence, however, does not connote naivety. By the time he reached Malaysia, Maslin had figured out that possession of a map would be useful where you did not speak the language. Possession of more ballast still, in the form of cross-bearings, dissenting views, and greater depth of understanding, might have proved more valuable again.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra reviewer.