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 to close its offices, Cummings looks back on his decades-long career in as a guide writer.
(CNN) - The recent news that Lonely Planet Publications was closing its production offices in Melbourne and London almost entirely, and completely eliminating its widely admired magazine and all non-guide titles, did not completely surprise me.
With planes on the ground, closed borders and people staying at home around the world in response to the Covid-19 health crisis, any business associated with travel and tourism is on its knees at this point.
However, after having been an author of the Lonely Planet guide for 25 years, I feel it.
I saw the business grow from a young two-person start-up in the 1970s to an empire with more than 500 office workers on four continents. In the 1990s, when I visited LP's headquarters in Melbourne two or three times a year, a steady increase in sales and production forced the company to relocate three times.
So for me, and I am sure that for many others who have grown up traveling the world with dog ear guides at hand, the closing of the Lonely Planet head office marks the end of an era.
In my life, this era began when I first read "Southeast Asia on a switchback" when I was 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 Britain's Tony Wheeler, who, with his Irish wife Maureen, created their DIY footprint four years earlier after completing a land trip from London across Asia to Australia. Their staple "Across Asia on the Cheap", with hand-drawn maps, sold 1,500 copies around the corner.
Each chapter was devoted to a different country in Southeast Asia, and although the information was thin and the maps barely usable, I was nevertheless impressed that someone did.
Born into a traveling military family who lived in Europe, I was used to the "F" guides - Fodor, Fielding and Frommer - who, for the most part, stuck to well-traveled routes in Europe, North America and in Japan.
"People who want to be comfortable and safe all the time may not want to read these books."
Guide author Joe Cummings
Created at the beginning of the post-World War II era, these guides were intended for people like my parents, who carried bulky suitcases and traveled by private car.
Writing about how to travel to developing countries via local buses and trains, Lonely Planet was very clandestine in comparison, for the time. When I finished my mission in Thailand and I was preparing to go home through India and Nepal, I checked in the bookstores of Bangkok to see if Lonely Planet had published anything else on these countries than brief chapters in their out of print "Across Asia on the cheap."
There was still nothing available on the two sites, but while browsing the shelves, I discovered Lonely Planet titles just released on Myanmar and Sri Lanka. I bought both, and read them end to end while traveling across the subcontinent (I actually haven't visited any of the countries before, as a Lonely Planet author on a mission).
Avoid culturally isolated travel
When I returned to the United States, I started writing for The Asia Record, a San Francisco area newspaper devoted to Southeast Asian affairs following the American-Vietnamese war and the fall. 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 seen through the eyes of communist insurgencies in Thailand and Malaysia.
One day, at the end of 1980, I sat down, I introduced a blue aerogram in my electric typewriter, I wrote a proposal for a guide "Lonely Planet Thailand" and I sent it directly to Tony Wheeler. Within weeks, Tony responded and said that, coincidentally, he was looking for someone to do a guide to Thailand and that LP was growing, he didn't have time to do it himself.
At her request, I sent her a writing sample that followed the Sri Lankan guide style and focused on Ko Sichang, an island off Sri Racha that I had visited several times while living in Bangkok. in the late 1970s. As far as I know, no one had ever published anything on 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 for my own plane tickets and expenses, but it turned out that I received a Berkeley scholarship to do field studies simultaneously, so I combined the two projects into one trip in the spring of 1981.
I hit the ground running. It was an exciting time for me, as the book I was looking for would become the first English guide entirely devoted to Thailand since the "Bangkok Guide 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 renting your own car and driver and staying in first-class hotels along the way, much like Fodor and others traditional guides.
In keeping with the LP philosophy, my goal was to avoid culturally isolated travel as much as possible. Our target readership was "the monsters of independent culture".
As I said to a reporter in a first newspaper interview, "people who want to be comfortable and safe all the time may not want to read these books."
Wearing nothing but a shoulder bag with a change of clothes, two notebooks and a SLR film camera with manual focus, I traded a Gibson electric guitar for (an exchange that I always regret!) , rot rawn (hot bus), omnipresent orange intercity buses with wooden floors and low rotary fans to stir the warm air.
Air-conditioned buses were rare at the time - in fact, none had yet appeared in Bangkok, and taxis in Bangkok had neither air conditioning nor meters. Sometimes I took a second and third class train.
For places like Chiang Mai, Ayuthaya and Phuket, the Tourism Authority of Thailand has distributed stapled mimeographs with straightforward and useful attraction and accommodation information for free - nothing like the glistening TAT promotions we see today - and I filled my bag with these. But for most other parts of Thailand, I would find a place to stay, then head straight to the local markets to chat with the locals.
As a rare farang (white foreigner) visitor, I would often be invited to share a bottle of Thai whiskey or a bowl of noodles, especially in the night markets. I would ask about places to see and things to do in the area, and my new friends would recommend waterfalls, museums, monuments.
Often someone volunteered to take me to the back of a motorcycle the next day, as long as I paid for fuel and meals. In small towns without hotels, I slept on the floor of a local Buddhist monastery.
Like living in a Graham Greene novel
Although I had traveled to Thailand while working near Bangkok two years ago, I had experienced the country very differently this time, without the constraints of a short school vacation.
I will always remember riding an old Yamaha motorcycle battered along unpaved roads from Chiang Mai to Mae Hong Son via Pai, through landscapes of rugged limestone peaks and dense forests of bamboo and teak, and feeling that i had fallen in paradise, as cliché as it may seem.
It was in April 1981, shortly after Songkran (Thai New Year), that I spent my first night in Pai at the Wiang Pai Hotel, a six-room, all-wood inn owned by Shan with an opium den functional at the rear. I remember thinking it was like living in a Graham Greene novel.
Likewise, arriving in Ko Samui by slow boat later this month and exploring the island via a single dirt road that encircled the interior, falling asleep at night in bamboo thatched huts to the sound of waves lapping the shore, I wondered how I deserved the privilege of finding such tropical idylls intact.
In Bangkok, I came across two ancient Chinese-style hotels on Khao San Road when leaving on foot to find Wat Phra Kaew and the Grand Palace. Since the hotels, which at the time were home to merchants buying wholesale goods nearby and selling them abroad, were inexpensive and within walking distance of major tourist sites, I wrote them down and included them in my LP guide.
When I returned to update for the next edition, the two hotels were packed with backpackers, and three small guesthouses had opened to accommodate the overflow. Apparently, this launched Khao San Road on its way to becoming the world's largest backpacker center in the mid-1990s.
"I found my vocation"
After 10 weeks of traveling, I returned to California, sat down at my typewriter and wrote the first 136-page edition of "Thailand - A Travel Survival Kit" in three weeks. After its release, it quickly became the best-selling title in LP's growing catalog, and remained so for the next 20 years.
I thought, "OK, it's going to be for me, I found my vocation," and I abandoned a provisional plan to do a doctorate. at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. From that moment on, I devoted myself to writing about travel, food, art and culture and never looked back.
This week, I watched this first edition, which has become more and more difficult to find these days.
My half-page introduction introduced Thailand's non-colonial heritage, breathtaking landscapes and laid-back culture. Under "Eat and sleep in northern Thailand" (yes, all in one section), I noted that there were 45 hotels and around 15 guesthouses in Chiang Mai.
I rejected Pattaya in three paragraphs, concluding: "Most non-tourists will find Pattaya devoid of good taste and culture and would do well to exclude it from their itineraries. Pattaya Beach is not really a beach to start with, and its biggest businesses, water sports and street sex, have pushed up the prices of food and accommodation above Bangkok level.
I noticed that Khon Kaen was well known as the main place where Thai Sticks (marijuana buds linked to bamboo) were assembled, and "the part of the product that does not leave the city for larger markets is deemed to be best available, in other words, the locals keep the best for themselves - old Thai hands call it "Khon Kaen Crippler". "
Such references lasted only two editions before an increasingly politically correct Lonely Planet removed them - ironic given the now legal status of medical marijuana in Thailand.
A market hungry for reliable and organized information
To say the obvious, yes, traveling 35 years ago without modern technology and today's mass tourism was more adventurous. Traveling to many parts of Asia at the time, if you encountered another hiker walking on the road, you would immediately rush to them and exchange travel tips.
This has changed. In the sixth edition, the guide "Lonely Planet Thailand" ("travel survival kit" was removed from the title along the way) was 800 pages long, and shortly after, it weighed just under a thousand, and everyone was wearing it.
By the time I stopped writing guides in 2006, LP Thailand had sold well over 2 million copies.
In addition to writing other guides on Bangkok, the islands and beaches of Thailand and Laos, I was hired to update existing Lonely Planet guides, including Myanmar (which I covered from 1988 in 1998, after which I was blacklisted by the military government until 2011), China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
When Lonely Planet had only one country they had not covered, Tony and Maureen invited me to write the first edition of Bhutan. I refused, because of overwork, a decision that I regret today because I am very attached to the country.
As for Lonely Planet in the days of coronaviruses, I hope it will survive as a brand. If the company can afford to continue until people travel again, I'm pretty confident that it can win back a hungry market for reliably organized information, which Lonely Planet offers compared to alternatives. Internet based on the crowd.
Although I have moved from guides to other types of writing, my passion for travel has never wavered.
Ajahn Buddhadasa, a famous Thai monk who died in 1993, said to me one day: "You know why you like to travel? Wherever you go, nothing belongs to you. When you are at home surrounded by your goods, you are weighed down. "
I think he was right; it's liberating to be reduced to a single suitcase, that's how I always travel, in the original LP style.
