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THE BRADT PACK

Travel guides - past, present and future
The Independent on Sunday, February 2007

THE first travel guide I ever owned was the 1990 edition of “Let’s Go Europe”. It was given to me and my then girlfriend before we left Australia to perform our national and cultural duty, as Antipodeans emerging from adolescence, of spending a few months annoying foreigners by asking them for directions in excruciating manglings of their language, and hitting them in the ribs with our rucksacks on crowded buses. “Let’s Go” was a volume of daunting heft, especially when flung emphatically at the back of your head by a woman wearied of your somewhat whimsical attitude to navigation, but the addresses and phone numbers printed in tiny writing on its hundreds of flimsy pages helped ensure that two clueless kids from Sydney spent four months in Eastern Europe and the Balkans without once being robbed, getting arrested, dining upon boiled horse – at least, not knowingly – or finding themselves forced to sleep in a hedge. Beyond these rudimentary protections, it also pointed us towards some singularly glorious experiences, of which we would otherwise have been ignorant: the waterfalls of Plitvice, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia; the mountaintop monasteries of northern Greece; the heavily subsidised trains of Eastern Europe, yet to be introduced to capitalism, doing first-class sleepers between Prague, Budapest and Bucharest for a fiver a go.
  “Let’s Go” was not infallible, however. That 1990 edition in particular would have been largely researched when there was still a wall across Europe. All its tips on coping with the bureaucracy of police states were out of date, most of its advice on visas and border formalities as redundant, by that point, as “The Communist Manifesto”, and many of its maps were useless, as the citizens of the former Soviet bloc set zealously about renaming streets, squares and parks that had, until recently, been compelled to honour such unlamented spectres as Lenin and Marx. In 1990, though, the only alternatives to “Let’s Go” were other travel guides, equally at the mercy of long production schedules and the rapidity of events. This was still the case when I hit the road alone in 1993, for a protracted wander in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. That’s not so long ago, not at all, but my memories of mailing postcards to friends, asking them to reply care of the central post office of whichever city I might be in three weeks hence, now seem so hilariously antediluvian that I can barely credit, as a stripling of 38, that I’m old enough to possess them.
  It’s a different world, now. I’ve continued to travel in it, and I’ve continued to use guidebooks – and even ended up helping write one, of which more presently – but they have changed surprisingly little. As more and more real-time information becomes available – often at no cost – and as the devices that enable us to access that information become progressively cheaper and portable (the least wieldy web-enabled mobile phone weighs less than the slenderest guidebook), it seems increasingly likely that the travel guide as we have long known it could go the way of the hammer and sickle.

“THAT’s the question, I suppose,” agrees Tony Wheeler. “How much longer will there be Lonely Planet books?”
  Wheeler is more responsible than any other person alive for our received wisdom of what a travel guide should be. He and his wife, Maureen, founded Lonely Planet in 1973. At that time, Wheeler recalls, travel guides catered largely to an idea of travel as a high-end luxury, a thing of hotel suites and portmanteaus, rather than hostels and backpacks. There were no guides catering for those seeking to do what the Wheelers had just done, slogging overland from London to Australia. Their first book, “Across Asia On The Cheap”, was the foundation of a publishing phenomenon. Lonely Planet now has 500 titles in print, and claims to sell an average of 6.5 million books a year in 118 countries. It has offices in Australia, the US and UK and, by Wheeler’s estimate, 200 writers on the road at any given time updating their guides.
  Over lunch in the rooftop staff canteen of Lonely Planet’s Melbourne headquarters, Wheeler reviews the empire he created with surprising diffidence. He seems uninspired, even vexed, by questions pertaining to Lonely Planet’s continuing viability, becoming animated and engaged only when talk turns to actual travel, for which he retains a crusading enthusiasm. Wheeler spends around six months a year travelling, which he now chronicles on a blog; recent trips have included Afghanistan, Iraq and Albania. He describes his role at Lonely Planet now as that of a “backseat driver”, and appears resigned to the idea that it’s never likely to be as fun as it once was.
  “It used to be a case,” he sighs, “of thinking, we need a guide to wherever it is, then telling someone to go and do it. Now, there’s a manual, and procedures to be followed.”
  The word “procedures” is delivered with a wince. This is implicit acknowledgement of a fashionable criticism of Lonely Planet, that the guides are not as irreverent or individual as they once were.
  “Yeah,” says Wheeler. “But a lot of that, honestly, is to do with ensuring that we stay profitable, especially after September 11th. It is amazing how quickly political events are reflected by book sales. I mean, our Lebanon one just dropped through the floor.”
  Wheeler does note that even if Lonely Planet has drawn its fangs tactfully inwards, it is still capable of causing affront. In 2006, a Moscow television station broadcast a thunderous editorial accusing Lonely Planet of depicting the Russian capital as an insect-infested jungle of drunks, gangsters and whores.
  “They got a little over-excited,” smiles Wheeler. “We did say that Moscow was corrupt, but, you know, Moscow complaining that you’ve accused the place of being corrupt. . . what can you say to that?”
  This is, however, a useful illustration of the power that travel guides possess – one that can go beyond merely encouraging or dissuading potential customers of particular sights, hotels or restaurants. When any one guide becomes sufficiently widely read by travellers to a particular destination, it ends up imposing an entirely new reality on the place, as tourists go, sleep and eat where they’re told.
  “Oh, I know,” says Wheeler. “There are people who treat Lonely Planet like a bible.”
  What might threaten that status – and Wheeler doesn’t sound like he thinks such a diminishment would be all bad – is the increasing availability of other information. Lonely Planet has embraced this, establishing the Thorn Tree forum on its website, where travellers can acquire and dispense wisdom. Any number of free websites heave with hotel and restaurant reviews and travel tips, all of which will have been updated more recently than the newest guide on the bookstore shelves. Some online guides are also now flaunting the idiosyncrasy that Lonely Planet feels it can no longer afford – www.cestsoparis.com, for example, offers a wry guide to coping with the legendary rudeness of Parisians.
  “True,” says Wheeler, “but how do you know you can trust the information? And there’s still going to be a place for a book for somewhere like Mongolia, where you can’t always drop into the local internet cafe.”
  The future as Wheeler eventually depicts it, will be somewhere between the paperback and the computer terminal: handheld devices, almost like a realisation of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, grabbing real-time, verified information from the internet, even to the extent of giving you directions from the bus station to the hostel.
  “That convergence,” observes Wheeler, “hasn’t happened yet, but it will – so providing GPS co-ordinates and things like that is something else our writers will have to learn to do.”

THE modern travel guide was pioneered by the German publisher Karl Baedeker in the 1840s, and the publishing house bearing his name continues to advise his countryfolk as regards which deckchairs to drape their towels pre-emptively over. The Baedeker name also endures as a quirk of World War II history – in 1942, the Luftwaffe launched the so-called Baedeker Raids, seeking to sap their enemy’s morale by flattening every historic building awarded more than three stars in Baedeker’s guide to Britain.
  This is something that will be lost if travel guides finally migrate entirely to the digital netherworld – their value as documents of social history. Because travel guides are concerned principally with the practicalities of the present they cater for, and are generally ideologically indifferent, about how rather than why, they can offer a dazzlingly clear view of the past. People are, by now, used to Australians traipsing about the planet in large – and, obviously, preternaturally handsome and charming – numbers, but it’s a reasonably recent phenomenon. In the early years of my country’s existence, we only travelled en masse when someone issued us with guns and directed us towards a British war. Though much lucid ink has been slung about the travails of the Anzacs on Gallipoli and in France, little illustrates Britain’s and Australia’s expectations of each other circa 1915 than an ancient book on my office shelf: “Colonials’ Guide To London”, a somewhat haughty volume written in the apparent belief that the incoming soldiers of Empire were a shower of hay-eating rubes requiring – no, really – instruction in crossing the street.
  Of course, value as picturesque antiques – and vintage Baedeker guides fetch handsome prices on eBay – is not what the authors of travel guides are seeking when they set about their task. I received a brisk lesson in the pitfalls of trying to predict the present a few years back, when I was asked to help out on the 5th edition of Robert Young Pelton’s “The World’s Most Dangerous Places”, the latest of a cultishly adored series of books offering advice about travelling in places most sane people wouldn’t want to travel to.
  “Yeah,” says Pelton, down the phone from his California home, “and I think we came out about a week before America invaded Iraq, didn’t we?”
  Pelton launched “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” – known to its adherents as DP – in 1993.
  “I worked in marketing,” he explains, “but I used to take a month off every year to do some kind of expedition into a hostile zone. And I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be great to have a book about places where you really do need a travel guide, because the wrong handshake could lose you your head.”
  Pelton released the first three editions of DP through Fieldings, the publishing company which he ran for five years in the 1990s. At that pre-interent time, there was no other single source of such vital hotspot information as phone numbers of embassies and NGOs, still less any guidance as to the best hotel in Kabul or nightlife options in Mogadishu. Now, that kind of basic information is so widely accessible that reprinting it would amount to a scandalous waste of paper.
  “News now travels so quickly,” says Pelton, “that what guides will have to focus on is sage advice. DP will have to become more of that first night in the bar of a war zone hotel, the information you need to survive while you’re there.”
  To that end, Pelton has established, on his website at www.comebackalive.com, a “Dangerpedia”: an open resource at which any war zone citizen or visitor can post information as they get it. He believes that this instant interactivity is the future for all travel guides, not just his.
  “The whole travel guide industry,” he says, “sprang from a lack of communication between the traveller and the place they were going to. Lonely Planet preys on fear, on people being nervous, and wanting a talisman that will keep them safe and save them money. If you think travel requires planning, stay home. The joy is learning about things you never knew existed.”
  Pelton believes that the future belongs to websites like craigslist, MySpace and couchsurfing, where people can arrange to meet, stay in each other’s homes and show each other around.
  “So, a guide,” predicts Pelton, “will once again be exactly the original meaning of the word – a human being, who’ll tell you what to see, and maybe invite you over for a drink.”
  It’s not just the march of technology that threatens the travel guide as we know it. There is also the problem that the books themselves have ossified into cliche – as brilliantly highlighted in recent times by the series of parodic guides to fictional countries (Molvania, Phaic Tan, San Sombrero) produced under the Jetlag brand by a troika of Australian comedians. These were an international critical and commercial success, able to do for Lonely Planet et al what “This Is Spinal Tap” did for heavy metal, precisely because the absurdities of what they mocked were so widely recognised.
  “Travel guides don’t reflect, any more, the way a lot of people travel,” says Jeremy Langmead.
  Langmead is the editor-in-chief of design magazine Wallpaper, which last September began launching an expansive range of city guides – 20 have been published, 20 more are due in March, and Langmead says they’ll keep going until they run out of cities. The Wallpaper guides are a deliberate lurch away from the usual detail-heavy ethos of travel guides. The slim, undeniably attractive volumes, published in association with Phaidon, contain more photography than text, and a ruthlessly pared-down selection of sights, hotels and restaurants – the idea, explains Langmead, is to cater for the business traveller or weekend-tripper who doesn’t have time to see everything, and does want to be sure they’re not drifting around the local equivalents of Madame Tussaud’s.
  “It’s increasingly hard,” says Langmead, “to find something that is unique to any city. I was in Shanghai for the first time recently, and I charged out of the hotel, really excited – and saw shops full of Louis Vuitton and Chanel. They’re lovely brands, but I can get those at home. These guides are supposed to be like your cool friend who’ll know where the good stuff is.”
  The Wallpaper guides do a largely fine job of selecting appetising, locally peculiar morsels, though there is some sloppy research – one of the four books selected as suggested reading in the Sydney guide is Doris Pilkington’s aboriginal outback odyssey “Rabbit Proof Fence”, which is like recommending “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” to someone going to New York. Nevertheless, at the heart of them is a recognition that while the logistical specifics of travel – addresses, phone numbers, prices – will become the property of the net, there will always be an appetite for inspiration from informed sources. This has also been recognised by Signal Books’ superb “Cities Of The Imagination” guides – cultural companions which disdain hotel and restaurant recommendations entirely in favour of informed, thoughtful and witty ruminations on each city’s history, literature and art.

BACK in Melbourne, Tony Wheeler concedes that the age of the housebrick-sized compendium of hostel addresses straining the seams of your backpack – or, if you got up first and moved quietly in the dark, your girlfriend’s backpack – is nearing its end.
  “There’s a different culture of travel now,” he says, “especially in Europe, people leaping in and out on budget flights, booking everything over the net. You’re unlikely to take a guidebook for a weekend away. But it’s also the sheer pace of change now. I mean, think of somewhere like China, which is so vast, and so fluid – it changes constantly, and the scale of those changes is immense. I changed planes recently somewhere in China, and had a couple of hours to kill, so I went out and took a look at the city. It had a population of 10 million people, and I’d never even heard of it.”
  Some things, however, will remain reassuringly constant.
  “I was talking to a German guidebook publisher recently,” says Wheeler. “He said Britain was the most boring one they did, because nothing ever changed – you only had to send someone over every two years to put all the prices up.”

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