Lonely Planet travellers transform the landscape they enter far more than did the doughty loners of decades past

In 1917, Harry A. Franck, an American who had learned Spanish while working as a police officer in the Panama Canal Zone, published Vagabonding Down the Andes, an engrossing account of his four-year journey through South America. Franck had a no-nonsense attitude to travel: “Though the means be more laborious, the mind is far sharper for facts and impressions while on foot than when lolling half asleep on a horse or in a train.” Franck’s preference for walking through South America fills his book with detailed insights into local cultures, which, making allowance for certain assumptions typical of a white American traveller of that time, still seem perceptive and relevant.

Unlike today’s travellers, Franck did not carry a guidebook. Even the idea of a human guide filled him with scorn. On arriving in Cuzco, Peru, he was distressed to find that the ancient Inca capital was spawning a tourist industry: “Visitors have become almost familiar sights, and there was already developing that pest of European show-places, unwashed and officious urchins offering their services as ‘guides,’ an occupation undreamed of elsewhere on the continent.” It was not that guides or guidebooks did not exist in Franck’s day; but the guidebooks that were available, principally the meticulously detailed German Baedeker series (published in English from 1878), focussed on Europe. Travellers in Latin America, Asia or Africa had to depend on advice from locals. Franck parodies Baedeker when, in his description of a visit to La Paz, Bolivia, he assigns certain sights, such as Aymara women’s costumes, two or three stars—“Baedeker-style,” as he says.

In Franck’s day, hotels were scarce in many places. Even the later American traveller A.F. Tschiffely—whose book The Tale of Two Horses (1935) describes his two-and-a-half-year odyssey from Patagonia to Washington, D.C., in the company of two horses—often slept in a jail. His book, charmingly narrated in the voice of his equine companions, reports: “When we spent the night in villages where there were no hotels or even dirty inns, Master [i.e., Tschiffely] always had to sleep in the police-station, the jail being the only available bed-room. If prisoners happened to be in these filthy dungeons, they were put into stocks for the night.”

Later travellers maintained a greater distance from local realities. The Old Patagonian Express (1979), Paul Ther