A Very Lonely Planet

Travel Guidebooks are a necessary evil. At least the cost of web browsing on an iphone overseas becomes a little friendlier. Guidebooks always seem to be out of date, full of extraneous information, and you end up with the situation where all the people in that ‘local’ restaurant in Hue had a copy of the favourite guidebook on their table. It’s no-ones fault, but the idea of a printed guidebook is so 19th century!!

Anyhow, one of Lonely Planet’s authors has just released a tell-all book which claims that not only did he accept gifts (contrary to LP policy) but actually didn’t visit some of the countries he wrote about. More in this news.com article:

In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

“They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian consulate.

All goes to show, that we can’t take anything at face value, whether it’s on the web, or in print