P.J. O'Rourke once wrote: 'There are no good books about pleasant journeys. It is the job of the travel writer to have an awful time.' In its first few pages, Paul Grogan's tale of two young men on a daunting 4,400km river journey from Mongolia to the Pacific ocean would seem a good candidate to meet O'Rourke's standards. The river passes through the rugged wilds of Siberia, promising a challenging story of man versus nature. And as the river in question, the Amur (Heilong He, or Black Dragon in Chinese), marks the politically sensitive border between China and Russia, the journey will be under heavy scrutiny from Russia's border patrol (the two aren't even permitted to set foot on the Chinese side). Thus, the reader is also set up for a good tale of intrepid explorers versus forces of authority.

But while Grogan and Richard Boddington's journey was exciting, the tale falls flat. The author makes the mistake of taking O'Rourke's axiom too far. Throughout 20 chapters, Grogan tries hard to create a sense of impending failure, ending nearly every chapter with an allusion to some potential tragedy waiting for the pair just around the bend. In each case, the peril turns out to be decidedly less than.

The gunboat filled with Russian soldiers seemingly intent on brutality at the end of one chapter winds up merely checking that their documents are in order. By the third paragraph of the next chapter, they're all trading postcards and vodka shots. The border guards sticking their Kalashnikovs in their tent at the end of another chapter are just stopping by for a

few drinks.

Chapter after chapter ends with an overblown cliffhanger, and by the middle of the book the reader is wishing that one of the lads would take a stray bullet just to liven things up. By book's end, the journey seems to have gone far too smoothly. One gets the feeling that every soldier stationed on the Amur has been told in advance of the adventurer's plans, and given strict instructions to trade postcards and vodka shots with them - after, of course, intimidating the duo by checking their paperwork and giving them stern warnings against camping without a permit or straying into China.

This exaggeration of the 'man versus man' angle robs the tale of its real tension - man versus nature. Except for some scenes involving the pair dealing with bad weather and hideous insect infestation, the reader is left feeling that the only real challenge of the wild Siberian summer is a harsh Russian bureaucracy.