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Vagabonding
Goodbye, Khao San Road
As he leaves Southeast Asia, our Vagabonding correspondent reflects on the evolution of the middle-class travel revolution.
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[10/12/99]

Publisher sponsors essay competition
Bradt Publications' contest offers a free trip for two to Patagonia as its top prize.
By Don George
[10/12/99]

A bittersweet saga in Sicily
An innocent visit to an "ancient" village fertility fest reveals a multilayered history of feuding families, conniving communists and failing farms.
By Frank Browning
[10/09/99]

Wanderlust
Arabian nighties
Among Egypt's minarets and mosques, covered women buy a ton of teddies.
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[10/08/99]

Travel Advisor
Get thee to a nunnery
Our travel expert offers advice on convent and church accommodations in Poland, trips to Baja and finding that perfect hotel/Broadway package in New York.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/07/99]

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The guidebook writer, of course, is a special subset of the traveler category. And the off-the-beaten-track guidebook writer is an even smaller subset of this subset. If anything, these writers are supposed to be the superheroes of the travel world: faster than a speeding rickshaw, more powerful than a tourist tout, able to sleep in small spaces on a cloth-ball mound.

Real-world Indiana Joneses, they venture where few have gone before in search of the fabled four-toed factoid, the village with no name, the hostel of the all-night cockroaches, the path not yet taken.

Lonely Planet Unpacked Travel disaster stories by Tony Wheeler and other Lonely Planet authors Lonely Planet Publications 251 pages Buy Lonely Planet Unpacked

What a glamorous life, we think. Their job is to visit some interesting place, stay in its hotels, eat in its restaurants, visit its museums and ruins, check out its hippest cafes and most obscure villages -- all the things we love to do when we travel, anyway. And they get paid to do this. What could be better?

The glamour of this guidebook writer's life is mostly illusion, of course, but it's one of those illusions we cherish and sustain because we need it. We want to believe that, even at this very moment, someone is slashing through sinewy vines to stumble upon a forgotten stone temple, or settling blissfully into a $2-a-night hut on a sandy beach that stretches forever.

But it ain't all mango smoothies and banana pancakes. Ask a few former guidebook writers and you'll soon hear the other side of the story. As Salon staffer Dawn MacKeen, who wrote the Greece section of the original Berkeley Guides book on Europe, wrote last year:

With a $35 daily stipend, I couldn't exactly hire an army to aid me in scouting out the streets, pensions and ruins, so I dipped into my own pockets to take the twice-as-fast hydrofoils instead of the slow-moving ferries, rented motorbikes instead of relying on the undependable, time-consuming bus system, went on dates with locals to ferret out recommendations from them and arrived alone in the dead of night in strange places (without a room to sleep in) so I could keep up with my editor's schedule. I even went back to work within an hour of crashing on a motor scooter -- despite the fact that I could barely walk. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough ...

Unfortunately, the circumstances I worked under -- the tight deadlines, the superficial method of information gathering, the financial restrictions -- are almost a guidebook industry standard.

And even if you survive the penurious pocketbooks and drop-dead deadlines, the world has its own way of throwing perverse wrenches into your well-oiled travel engine.

Lonely Planet -- the globe-girdling publisher that has facilitated more than its fair share of guidebook-writer misadventures -- celebrates its road-stained wretches in the hot-off-the-presses "Lonely Planet Unpacked," a collection of tales of delightful disaster written by 26 of the company's veteran contributors, including founder Tony Wheeler.

Next page | Charged by elephants, lost in jungles, stranded in Resolute