Love those Hippies at Lonely Planet

A few years ago when I first started traveling, I bought my first Travel book – Fodor’s Guatemala. It came in handy, it made my trip much easier. At the time I knew almost nothing about Guatemala; it told me where to go. A few months later, as a Christmas present my family gave me Fodor’s South America – a big thick and heavy book. A few months later on a trip to Santiago Chile, I lugged it along, once again it proved helpful; I know that if I didn’t have it I wouldn’t have visited Viña del Mar. Viña, rememeber it from Missing, the the home base for the CIA and Chilean military as they plotted the coup against Allende.

After Chile, travel books and I were off and running. Now travel books are expensive but I was lucky. I few blocks away is the Wheaton Regional Library which housed the Friends of the Library – the used book donation and selling arm of the library. And what do you know they had a great travel section – one of the advantages of living in the Washington DC area. The Friends of the Library had shelves and shelves of travel books. Fodros’, Moons’, Rick Stevens’, and Lonely Planets’. I knew I’d be traveling a bit in the next few years so I started to keep my eye out for countries of interest. I got Fodor’s Spain and France – I bought those because I wanted to follow La Vuelta de España and Le Tour de France. Hell, they were only a dollar or two a piece; how could I go wrong. I started looking for a country here or a country there; you know, places I thought there was a chance that I might travel. I mostly collected books on developing countries; the developed world was not much of an interest to me , nor was classic tourism – Paris and London were of little interest, but Africa, Central America, and India were exciting, and with my work possible destinations.

And again, the area proved to be a boom – the Friend’s bookstore was brimming with books on the developing world, but they weren’t Fodor’s or Moon’s – they were published by Lonely Planet, so I picked-up a few. Around the same time I came across a program on PBS – Globe Trekker. If you haven’t seen it, it’s one of the many travel shows on television these days, but with a twist; they’re trekkers, they go by bus, they stay in hostels, they eat in the local markets. In short, they avoid the tourist hotels, the guided tours, the places that generally sponsor the travel shows. The host are youngish, not, “Hey, man, this is so cool!’ early twenties, but rather a little wore thirtyish; the woman are attractive but certainly not model want-a-bees. The one man host, Ian Wright, has a face for radio, and a voice that should never be recorded; but they all have personality, and they all can speak without clichés. They give a bit of the feel of aging hippies, but in the good sense, not the flower child stereotype.

The Globe Trekker series was originally called Lonely Planet and inspired by the Lonely Planet travel book series, but I think that’s the extent of the connection. Today they are both independent. The TV series has become more commercial – it has a ten minute segment on shopping at the end of each show, but it is easily avoided.

Over time I began to collect more and more books, I started going to the store just to see if they had new Lonely Plant guides available. It became a minor obsession. Today I have over 50 different countries. I have my obsession under control, yet I still go to the library outlet looking for new ones. I’m more selective; I’m back to only collecting editions of countries that I think I might travel to at some point in the future, nevertheless if you see a newly slim bald guy in the travel section of the Friends of the Library Store in Wheaton, get out of his way; he is still a man obsessed.