Brian Thacker - Tell Them to Get Lost: Travels With the Lonely Planet Guide Book That Started it All

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Tell Them to Get Lost

ePub ISBN 9781742751962

A William Heinemann book

Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by William Heinemann in 2011

Copyright Brian Thacker 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.

Extracts reproduced with permission from South East Asia , ed. 1 1975 Lonely Planet, and Southeast Asia , ed. 15 2010 Lonely Planet.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Thacker, Brian, 1962

Tell them to get lost / Brian Thacker.

ISBN 978 1 74275 195 5 (pbk.)

Southeast Asia Description and travel.

915.90453

Cover photographs from stck.xchng (crocodile: carollam; goat: zirak; rat: puellakas; snake: stylesr1)

Cover design by Design by Committee

Internal design by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Typeset and eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

To my sweet, darling Beth

The town was full of drunk tourists staggering around singing football chants, but the guidebook described it as a sleepy fishing village with only one place to stay, I pointed out to Lonely Planets founder, Tony Wheeler.

Tony and I were sitting side by side at a book signing after sharing a panel at the Melbourne Writers Festival. There was a long queue of people in the bookshop waiting for their books to be signed, but they just didnt happen to be any of our books. (The queue of mostly old ladies were all waiting to see some American author with a beard who wrote detective/thriller/love stories or something similar.) Id been telling Tony about when I had travelled around the Greek island of Corfu on a scooter using a 1971 guidebook that I had picked up at a boot sale in London for 50 pence. Although it had only been 16 years after the book was published, Corfu had been an entirely different place. Those once-quiet fishing villages had all been transformed into colossal resorts and the delightfully empty beaches now had wall-to-wall sunburned bodies.

Suddenly an idea occurred to me.

Has anyone ever attempted to travel with the first Lonely Planet On a Shoestring guidebook? I asked the guru himself.

No, Ive never heard of anyone doing it, Tony said with a shrug.

I thought about it for a minute. Would you have a copy of your first guidebook that I could have?

A few minutes later, I was planning a trip around South-East Asia following Tony and Maureens footsteps through Portuguese Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and Singapore, but with a catch I would use the original 1975 Lonely Planet South east Asia on a shoestring as my only guidebook.

This was exactly the next great adventure I was looking for. After 25 years of gallivanting around the globe, I was always on the lookout for alternative ways to see and experience the world. Though I still travelled the, you might say, conventional way, I found it so much more exciting when I could delve deep into a culture through the eyes of a local or explore without any preconceived ideas of what a place was like. My somewhat unconventional travels had included a couch-surfing jaunt across every continent, a tour of the worlds wackiest festivals and a journey without a guidebook to countries I knew absolutely nothing about.

Id only seen a small slice of South-East Asia (a bit of Thailand and Singapore), so this trip would give me a chance to discover what the region was like through the eyes of a backpacker traipsing through Asia in the 1970s. I was intrigued to find out what had changed and what was still around since the Wheelers rode through steamy jungles on a clapped-out Yamaha motorcycle wearing bell-bottom pants.

Back then, Asia was the new frontier for young travellers who journeyed overland from Europe to Australia, on what would become known as the Hippie Trail. The hippies were the real trailblazers through South-East Asia. Their parents werent interested in exploring the region particularly Australians whose perception of Asia had more to do with the horrors of war than the wonders of ancient civilisations.

The overland travellers of the 60s and 70s had many reasons for going to Asia: some sought spiritual enlightenment, some were seeking freedom from the moral and social restraints of home and some just wanted to drop out. Or just take lots of drugs. The hippie hot spots on the overland route were full of cheap guesthouses that were in turn filled with the sweet smell of marijuana. By the time the Wheelers published South east Asia on a shoestring , young Australians were beginning to head over to Asia in droves.

A few weeks after the book signing, I met up with Tony at the Lonely Planet office in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Footscray to pick up his slightly battered copy of the 1975 South east Asia on a shoestring , otherwise known as The Yellow Bible .

That hotel is still there, Tony exclaimed, as he flicked through the old guidebook. And so is that one. I was quite surprised to discover how thin the book was in size as well as content. At only 148 pages, it dwarfed in comparison to the current 15th edition of the guidebook, which was more than 1000 pages long and weighed almost as much as my luggage.

Of course, some things had changed since the first edition. For a start, the current edition had a few more country additions. Missing in action from the original guidebook was Vietnam (at the tail end of the Vietnam War), the Philippines (Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law) and Cambodia (Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had seized power). But they werent the only politically unstable countries. Only a few short months after the launch of the original guidebook, East Timor (which was then Portuguese Timor) was invaded by Indonesia and didnt gain independence until 2002. Laos had been taken over by the communist Pathet Lao at the same time Indonesia was storming into Timor and tourists werent welcome back into the country for decades. In 1974, Burma had already been suffering under a military dictatorship and sadly, almost 40 years later, there is just a different maniacal general running and ruining the country. Some countries have flourished, however. Thailand has become one of the worlds biggest tourist meccas. Singapore has become richer and cleaner, and Malaysia is even more westernised and shiny. Indonesia has gained substantial economic growth, but along the way has dealt with bombings, tsunamis, earthquakes and millions of Australians taking over Kuta Beach.