Goodbye Lonely Planet

[reader]

From CNN

The wild story behind Lonely Planet's first Thailand guidebook

By Joe Cummings

 

Editor's Note — Joe Cummings created the very first Lonely Planet Thailand guide, which was published in the early 1980s. As the famous travel brand begins shuttering its offices, Cummings reflects on his decades-spanning career as a guidebook writer.

 

(CNN) — The recent news that Lonely Planet Publications was shutting down its production offices in Melbourne and London almost entirely, and totally eliminating its widely admired magazine and all non-guidebook titles, didn't take me completely by surprise.

 

With planes grounded, borders closed and people staying home all over the world in response to the Covid-19 health crisis, any business associated with travel and tourism is on its knees at this point.

Still, having been a Lonely Planet guidebook author for 25 years, I feel it.

 

I watched the company grow from a fledgling two-person start-up in the 1970s to an empire with more than 500 office staff on four continents. In the 1990s, when I was visiting LP's headquarters in Melbourne two or three times a year, a steady climb in sales and production forced the company to shift to a larger location three times.

 

Thus for me, and I'm sure for many others who grew up hopping the globe with dog-eared guidebooks close at hand, the closure of Lonely Planet's original headquarters signals the end of an era.

In my life, that era kicked off when I first read "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring" while on my way to work in Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1977.

 

Nicknamed "the yellow bible" by its legion of devotees, the rustic guide was written by the UK's Tony Wheeler, who together with his Irish wife Maureen, created their DIY imprint four years earlier after finishing an overland journey from London across Asia to Australia. Their stapled-together "Across Asia on the Cheap," complete with hand-drawn maps, sold 1,500 copies on street corners down under.

 

Each chapter was devoted to a different country in Southeast Asia, and although the info was skimpy, and the maps barely usable, I was nevertheless impressed that someone had actually done it.

Born to a traveling military family who lived in Europe, I was used to the "F" guides -- Fodor's, Fielding and Frommer's -- which for the most part stuck to well-trod itineraries in Europe, North America and Japan.

 

Established during the early post-WWII era, these guides were geared towards people like my parents, who carried bulky suitcases and traveled by private car.

Writing about how to travel in developing countries via local bus and train, Lonely Planet was very underground by comparison, for the time. When I finished my assignment in Thailand and was preparing to travel home by way of India and Nepal, I checked Bangkok bookshops to see if Lonely Planet had published anything more on these countries other than brief chapters in their out-of-print "Across Asia on the Cheap."

There was nothing available on either place yet, but while browsing the shelves, I discovered just-released Lonely Planet titles on Myanmar and Sri Lanka. I bought both, and read them cover-to-cover while traveling through the subcontinent (I didn't actually visit either country till later, as a Lonely Planet author on assignment).

Avoiding culturally insulated travel

Back in the States, I started writing for The Asia Record, a San Francisco-area newspaper dedicated to Southeast Asian affairs in the wake of the US-Vietnam War and fall of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. I also enrolled in a master's program at the University of California at Berkeley, where I wrote a thesis on tourism as seen through the eyes of communist insurgencies in Thailand and Malaysia.

One day in late 1980, I sat down, fed a blue aerogram into my electric typewriter, wrote out a proposal for a "Lonely Planet Thailand" guide, and mailed it directly to Tony Wheeler. Within a few weeks, Tony wrote back and said that coincidentally he was looking for someone to do a guide on Thailand, and since LP was expanding, he didn't have time to do one himself.

 

At his request, I sent him a writing sample that followed the Sri Lanka guide template and focused on Ko Sichang, an island off the coast of Sri Racha that I'd visited several times while living in Bangkok in the late '70s. As far as I knew, no one had ever published anything about the island in English before.

 

Tony's second response came quickly, offering $9,000 to create the first edition of Thailand -- a travel survival kit. I had to pay my own air fare and expenses, but as it turned out I simultaneously received a paid fellowship from Berkeley to carry out field studies, so I rolled the two projects into one trip during the spring of 1981.

 

I hit the ground running. It was an exciting moment for me, since the book I was researching would become the first English-language guide devoted entirely to Thailand since "Guide to Bangkok with Notes on Siam," published by the State Railway of Siam in 1928. Although there were a couple of French and German guides, they were very much geared towards hiring your own car and driver and staying in first-class hotels along the way, much like Fodor's and other mainstream guides.

Continues at

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/joe-cummings-lonely-planet-thailand/index.html

[vinapu]

as proud owner  of, at last count 107 of their guidebooks I must say it's sad news indeed although it looks they still will be publishing those . Another victim of virus and digitization.