Down and Dirty Tours

It's unlikely you'll see the "Vice Guide to Travel" featured on Oprah, Expedia or the Travel Channel anytime soon. The DVD, produced by the editors of pop culture's irreverent Vice Magazine and under the creative direction of video and now film's Spike Jonze (Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation"), forgoes the gated resorts of Jamaica and spas of New Mexico to run with illegal-arms dealers in Pakistan, converse with dirty-bomb dealers in Bulgaria and shoot wild, radioactive boar in Chernobyl. In one segment, a Vice reporter goes to Paraguay to visit the failed Nazi commune of Nueva Germania and finds its last two inhabitants living in squalor. He interviews locals who remember Dr. Josef Mengele, dubbed "The Angel of Death" during World War II because of his horrific surgical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. The villagers recall that during his last days, he ate out of tin cans and spent each night screaming in his sleep.

Odd but telling details like these make up much of the Vice guide, which is available on the Viceland.com site as well as Amazon. (Vice is not only a magazine—it's also expanded with several stores, a film company, a TV show, a publishing house and a record label.) But the guerrilla team of hosts and reporters, which include the magazine's own publishers Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, dig up some fairly big and disturbing stories, too. In Bulgaria, they track down a black-market merchant who recently sold a dirty bomb to an undercover French journalist. They talk with him over tea and find out just how easy it is to obtain nuclear waste and turn it into a bomb. It raises the question, how is this ragged and inexperienced team getting access to places and people that CNN and the BBC are not? In Lebanon, they embed themselves in a troop of Boy Scouts who aspire and train to become anti-occupation martyrs rather than Eagle Scouts. Another Vice reporter goes into Rio's most notorious slum, the City of God, and attends a gang-sponsored rave. According to a local, when a prominent Brazilian journalist tried to do the very same thing—film one of these parties—he was kidnapped, placed inside a stack of old tires and burned alive. Yet the Vice reporter dances with locals until sunrise and makes it out alive, albeit with a nasty hangover. "We have fixers, local young people who know we're coming over," explains Smith, who lives in New York but was born, raised and started Vice in Canada. "We dress up the part and go with them. They say, don't act like an American and you won't have problems. In Beirut, we got access to [the] Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade because we came in with local dudes and we don't look like CNN. When you're just kind of bummy, wearing an old T shirt and have a beard with food in it, then no one looks twice."