Before Lonely Planet

Stephen Henighan

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 Ther­oux’s dys­pep­tic account of a jour­ney by train from Boston to Patagonia, reveals a far more super­fi­cial grasp of Latin American soci­ety than the books of either Franck or Tschiffely. Theroux looks down on both Latin Americans and other trav­ellers, par­tic­u­larly back­pack­ers, whom he derides as “cheapskates.” 

I took this insult per­son­ally when I read Theroux’s book because at the time I was one of those cheap­skate back­pack­ers in South America. For three months in late 1981 and early 1982, financed by eight U.S. $100 bills con­cealed in dif­fer­ent parts of my body, I wan­dered by bus and pickup truck through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Unlike Harry Franck, I car­ried a guide­book. Yet it was a book of which Franck might have approved: the South American Handbook. A sturdy, small-format hard­cover of 1,304 pages, this vol­ume cov­ered all of Latin America and the Caribbean from Bermuda and Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. The South American Handbook assumed a trav­eller who was enter­pris­ing, lit­er­ate, upper mid­dle class, white, com­fort­able in the local lan­guages, and male. The title page set the tone with an epi­graph from Rudyard Kipling: “And I’d like to roll to Rio / Some day before I’m old.” The intro­duc­tion announced with peer­less self-confidence that: “This book tells the vis­i­tor, whether sight­seer or busi­ness­man, what he most needs to know.” Modelled on Baedeker, the South American Handbook included painstak­ingly com­plete accounts of national his­tory, betray­ing a par­tic­u­lar fas­ci­na­tion with con­sti­tu­tional arrange­ments. Few read­ers were per­turbed by dec­la­ra­tions such as, “In 1609 the Society of Jesus sent a num­ber of mis­sion­ar­ies to Paraguay to civ­i­lize the Indians.” Nor did trav­ellers who were not white males find advice that suited their spe­cific needs. The only lines devoted to women trav­ellers were: “All women vis­it­ing South America should know how to cry. It is very use­ful at times!”

In January 1982 in the lobby of the Hotel Europa, the pre­ferred hang­out for back­pack­ers in Lima, Peru, I met a bearded Australian who, almost unthink­ably, was not using the South American Handbook. A group of us gath­ered around to look at his glossy soft­cover guide­book, with its per­func­tory his­tor­i­cal pas­sages, large, sim­ple maps, neo-hippie sen­si­tiv­ity to trav­ellers of dif­fer­ent tastes, and pared-down selec­tion of hotel and trans­porta­tion infor­ma­tion. The book was called South America on a Shoestring. We dis­missed it, shak­ing our heads at the vital infor­ma­tion the Australian was miss­ing. Little did we know that we had seen the future.

South America on a Shoestring was one of the first guide­books pub­lished by Lonely Planet, which now pro­duces the most suc­cess­ful such series in the world. There are few cor­ners of the planet that have not been mapped by Lonely Planet. Even the South American Handbook has been revised in ways that reflect Lonely Planet’s dom­i­nance. The company’s for­mula, lay­ing its easy-to-consult cat­e­gories over each des­ti­na­tion like a grid, has not only charted the world: it has changed it. By assur­ing almost every­one that they can travel to far­away places and find famil­iar com­forts and atti­tudes, Lonely Planet, along with its com­peti­tors, has acted as a cat­a­lyst in installing cheap hotels, trans­porta­tion links and English-speaking per­son­nel in loca­tions where oth­er­wise they might not exist. Concerned with demon­strat­ing a basic cul­tural (and, more recently, eco­log­i­cal) sen­si­tiv­ity rather than acquir­ing a pro­found his­tor­i­cal aware­ness, Lonely Planet trav­ellers, by virtue of their atti­tudes and their sheer num­bers, trans­form the land­scape they enter far more than did the doughty lon­ers of decades past. By appeal­ing to a mass sen­si­bil­ity while at the same time acknowl­edg­ing spe­cific cat­e­gories of trav­ellers — female, gay, coloured, dis­abled, older — Lonely Planet has col­lab­o­rated in the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of travel, the spread of the val­ues of English-speaking pop­u­lar cul­ture and the homog­e­niza­tion of the globe. The series incar­nates a transna­tional cul­ture that is both highly spe­cial­ized and increas­ingly monot­one. Small hotels from Istanbul to Abidjan plas­ter the Lonely Planet logo on their doors; restau­rants and busi­nesses scram­ble to offer ser­vices that will attract the Lonely Planet traveller. 

To a strik­ing degree, Lonely Planet read­ers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elas­tic, infi­nitely portable bound­aries of the Lonely Planet nation. In the twenty-first cen­tury, all but the very wealthy are Lonely Planet trav­ellers. I, too, now belong to this nation, yet I rarely enter its ter­ri­tory with­out lament­ing the rougher-edged, more mul­ti­far­i­ous world that existed before Lonely Planet.