Tony Wheeler: Travel's Biggest Hypocrit?

[ROB]

Anyone seen the latest from the Wheelers?

"Badlands: Tourist on the Axis of Evil"

http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/0,2 ... 40,00.html

I remember when we were "irresponsible" for this, but now it seems travelling to DPs is perfectly acceptable. I wonder what changed.

[RYP]

He is still a pencil neck geek. The exact words from his wife Maureen re DP1: "You should be ashamed of yourself sending people to dangerous places"

He is above all, a professional dilitente that has created a generation of tourists who think third world countries are full of purple backpacks and smelly feet.


He is a very nice guy but should leave travel expertise to people who don't need to make a sarong do double duty as a towel and headscarf.


Mad, bad, fascination


Article from: The Courier-Mail

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TONY Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet, has penned Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil, his first-person account of travelling through some of the most maligned and misunderstood nations in the world. Here is an extract.

What is it about Afghanistan which stirs such interest and passion with everybody from invading armies (Britain and Russia both burnt their fingers there) to carpet collectors (read Christopher Kremmer's incisive <i>The Carpet Wars</i>) and, of course, a host of acclaimed travel writers?

Eric Newby's classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Jason Elliot's much more recent An Unexpected Light are both set in Afghanistan. Even Bruce Chatwin wrote about it although he rejoiced that he visited the country "before the hippies wrecked it''.

They did this, he claimed, "by driving educated Afghans into the arms of the Marxists''.

As far as I know flower power didn't bring too many other countries to their knees, but I visited Afghanistan at the height of the hippie trail era so if Chatwin got it right I guess I have to bear some responsibility for the subsequent mess.

My return, 34 years later on to write Bad Lands, reminded me why, if the chaos ever ends, this could again be a great destination. It's a dramatic land of snow-capped mountains and searing desert wastes, fast-running rivers and villages wedged into steep green valleys.

Mix in a host of crumbling old fortresses and hidden religious monuments and then add a sprinkle of abandoned Russian tanks and other armaments. Dot a few big cities into the picture and people the landscape with the proud if sometimes slightly crazy Afghans, and it's easy to see why the place had such a magnetic pull in the 1960s and 1970s.

My recent Afghan wanderings started and finished in Kabul with excursions north to Mazar-i-Sharif and east to Herat. From Herat I made a four-wheel-drive foray into the rugged centre of the country to visit the towering and impossibly remote Minaret of Jam.

Another trip into the centre took me to Bamiyan, where the giant Buddhas were destroyed as a final act of destructive madness by the Taliban.

Along the way I met amazing people and over and over again had those "Wow, look at that'' experiences which remind us that the world is still a big, wide place full of surprising wonders.

The ancient city of Balkh, which is just waiting for keen archeologists, certainly fits that category. As does the impressive Buddhist stupa of Takht-e-Rustam, cut out of solid rock.

There were also more mundane surprises, like how good the food was or how well my mobile phone worked. I picked up a local SIM card from a mobile phone shop in the centre of Kabul and joined the Afghan hordes, shouting into their phones. It seemed to work in even remote corners of the country.

Flying back to Kabul from Herat I found myself sitting next to a young Afghan phone engineer. He'd returned to Afghanistan a couple of years earlier, after growing up in a Pakistan refugee camp.

In a country which sometimes feels like it's only left the Middle Ages yesterday, it's remarkable how the mobile phone and Bollywood TV soaps have become part of everyday life.

Tony Wheeler is the co-founder of Lonely Planet and author of Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil, his first-person account of travelling through some of the most maligned and misunderstood nations in the world.

[friendlyskies]

Maureen Wheeler really said that? Didn't she grow up in Belfast?

I figure that ever since they sold so much of LP to that "Australian Donald Trump" guy (can't remember his name), fired 2/3 of their global staff and almost all their old-school writers, then hired a bunch of professional executives from places like Conde Nast to replace overpaid former backpackers who'd risen through the editorial ranks, they've lost a lot of creative control. I met some LPers who felt that even though the company's become a lot more profitable and efficient since the 2002 corporate reshuffle (blamed on...9/11!), the book updates are getting sloppy, often done by brand-new (cheap) authors who get half the time and money that the experienced writers did. It's like, "milk the name and if/when LP loses its street cred, go elsewhere."

Look at their big moneymakers (other than the bestselling guides, India, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Australia, etc) since LP stopped being a mom-and-pop and became more corporate. They aren't guidebooks, they're these big, hardback coffee table books with pretty photo reproductions, basic stats about the destination and a heartwarming anecdote. No research costs, no travel costs, no updates, no two-year shelf life.

Somewhere, there was a brainstorming meeting: What other travel-related products that hit the armchair traveler market, and which don't require regular updating, can we produce? What's a market with proven returns that's still relatively untapped by Fodors and Moon? DPs! Bonus: It keeps Tony out of their hair for a few months.

End result, Tony gets to feel relevent, LP gets a hip, edgy new product and RYP gets a Starbucks right across the street from his independent coffee shop. That's probably OK for now, LP's marketing will increase general interest in DPs so sales go up all around. But if it makes money, Moon, Fodors, Rough Guides etc will follow, no joke.

[buffybot_in_beirut]

friendlyskies sums it up nicely. I know nothing of LP's corporate politics, but as a simple consumer of LP products I notice that the guidebook quality has gone down, country info is recycled in a multitude of products in addition to the core guidebooks, and the LP product offer resembles a shopping mall rather than a bookstore. And I still HATE the new guidebook design and chapter setup introduced 3 or 4 years ago.

The trouble is that for many regions of the world LP is still the only supplier of guidebooks catering to individual travellers. Rough Guides are catching up, but many countries are not yet covered. I just asked for a guidebook covering Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar in English or French or German. There's nothing. Just the outdated LP.

It's like a love-hate relationship. The current LP really sucks, but LP has a place in my heart (and LP books have 2 meters on my bookshelf). The only 100% excellent LP product is the Thorntree, and that's only because of the huge number of users. I know people here at the BFC hate the TT, but folks stop being delusional - there is just not enough travel info (or travel knowledge) on the BFC for a truly global coverage. On the TT, I normally get replies to even the most obscure questions. (But I admit that I, too, find wading through all the Morocco and safari posts tedious when I search the Africa TT for info on more unusual destinations..)

[RYP]

Its Myanmar, only limp wristed hippies and angry cat ladies call it Burma.

I suppose the idea of copying DP has a certain freshness to the LP crowd. I suppose now he will have to delete all those holier than thou Thorn Tree posts.

Wheeler has to be in his 60's by now. I would like to know where he went in Iraq, I assume Kurdistan.

[RYP]

Tony has an "evil meter"....no wait... he has TRADEMARKED the "evil meter"....

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1741791 ... eader-link


Q& A with Tony Wheeler on Bad Lands
What motivated you to write this book?
George Bush. I’ve always been interested in places ‘on the edge.’ That could mean places that are going through transitions or have been effectively inaccessible and then become accessible in some fashion. Or places that are simply very little visited. I had been kicking around the idea of writing something about ‘pariah countries,’ the places which for various reasons various people disapprove, and then George Bush gave it a theme when he announced his Evil Axis. I viewed the Evil Axis as a travel list of places I really should visit and then began to think about how the list could be expanded to include other countries viewed as pariahs, evil or simply bad.

Why ‘Bad Lands’?
Badlands is a geographical/physical term for a barren and eroded area and in particular the ‘Bad Lands’ of Dakota and Nebraska in the USA. I saw the title as a neatly ironic way of defi ning these countries, they are ‘bad countries’ or ‘bad nations’ or, for this book, ‘Bad Lands.’ Of course we have to question just how bad they really are and that’s a large part of what I try to do with this book.

Did writing this book present any special problems?
I had to be very cautious about getting people in trouble, I haven’t made anything up but a lot of names have been changed. Sometimes when I say I talked to A in town B the reality is that I talked to X in town Y. What inspired you to develop the Evil MeterTM? After I’d written the book I decided there should be some way of measuring just how bad these places were, or if they were indeed bad at all. In some cases I’m looking back to how the countries were when they earned their ‘bad’ status. So in the case of Albania it’s looking back to the Enver Hoxha era. In Afghanistan to when the Taliban were in power. For North Korea, however, it’s looking at the country as it is today.

What was the quirkiest place you visited?
No question at all it was North Korea. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place as strange as North Korea, it often felt like a movie set, that if you walked around behind the building you would fi nd it wasn’t real, it was just a fake frontage. For example it’s rumoured that the Pyongyang subway system only runs between the couple of stations which tourists are taken to see. All the rest of the system is either an elaborate fake or simply unused. In fact I later met a diplomat who said he had travelled widely on the system and it did indeed exist and operate normally. As a visitor, however, our access is so restricted that stories like this develop. The complete disconnection and isolation from the outside world, the lack of news or contact, the complete absence or western brands and products all contribute to making this a very strange country.

Were there any surprises?
I had wanted to visit Libya for years because of the superb Roman ruins, in particular Leptis Magna, but I was unprepared for the postcard perfection of the Sahara Desert in the south.

In Saudi Arabia there is virtually no foreign tourism apart from the religious tourism of Islamic visitors coming to the country on pilgrimage. So I was very surprised to discover how easy it was to travel around, how few problems I faced and how much interest the country offers for non-Islamic visitors. Unhappily most of the Islamic interest is closed off to non-Islamic visitors, in contrast to Afghanistan and Iran for example. I have to add the rider that I am male, if I’d been female visiting Saudi Arabia would have been a very different situation.

Iran was a surprise for the outgoing friendliness of the people, their deep interest in the outside world, their outspokenness, the surprising directness of women (a real contrast to other Islamic countries in the book) and for the relative openness of mosques and other religious sites. In Saudi Arabia non-believers are totally banned from mosques, in Esfahan in Iran I was urged to go back to a mosque for a second visit because both a night and a day visit were necessary for real appreciation.

How would you like people to respond to Bad Lands?
I hope they fi nd it an interesting peek into some relatively inaccessible places, I hope they realise that ‘bad’ is a relative term and that there are always two sides to every story. I’ve tried to show the other side of the story and also think about how some ‘Good Lands’ would shape up if I applied my Evil Meter to them.

About Tony Wheeler
Tony wrote his first book and founded Lonely Planet with his wife Maureen in 1973 after they completed a yearlong trip from London across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and into Australia. Since then, Lonely Planet guides have become essential resources for adventur-ous and curious-minded travelers the world over. Today Lonely Planet publishes over 500 guidebooks to destinations on every continent and has offices in Melbourne, London, and Oakland with more than 400 staff.

for further information contact Lonely Planet USA ››
view Press Release overview ››

[friendlyskies]

LP's street cred is already so vulnerable, please be sure to milk this RYP. Go on the Colbert Report or something. When's Licensed to Kill coming out in paperback, can't you slap something on the cover like "by the original DP author" and put it next to the LP version in the stores?

Anyway, I guarantee that most of the content for Badlands was condensed from existing (and probably outdated) titles, Tony's research was probably just for "local color." He's a tough little dude, though, I bet he got outside the Green Zone at some point. Still, I'd take a careful pass through it looking for plagiarism, if I know LP's disgruntled editors, they were deliberately sloppy doing work they knew would be published under Tony's name.

Anyway, buffybot, LP loses a ton of money on those little titles, Chad and Myanmar and the Stans, as well as low-sales, high-cost-to-research destinations like Greenland and Norway. But they can't cancel them, because that's the brand signature, LP's global reach (especially now that their "budget backpacker Bible" status is being revoked). Instead, they've evidentally been increasing the update cycles and cutting budgets, which forces authors to do phone/internet updates and cut other corners. Which is probably fine for Norway, but seems a tad irresponsible for actually dangerous places. Just because LP gets such fresh, inexperienced travelers, you know?

[RYP]

Sorry to disapoint you but Tony is a multi millionaire who likes exotic cars and owns a third of the world's largest travel publishing company. You can read the book online at Amazon to find that yes, he did go to Kurdistan which is about as dangerous as Cleveland. Perhaps less.

Its an idea that Andrew Mueller and others have done funnier and before.

But its a big world and there are plenty of PC friendly readers who want to tsk tsk. This book is overtly political and overtly designed to Bush bash (which is kinda wierd since it was in fact Lonely Planet that began the idea of boycotting places like Myanmar...I doubt that Bush even knows where Yangon is.)



The rest of the places already have LP guides to them.

So given Tony's lack of humor and stubborn resistance to evolving past the 70's it should make the grey haired lesbians and pathoulic soaked nose ring crowd quite happy.

From Publishers Weekly
The founders of the popular Lonely Planet travel guides deliver a lively autobiography that is as interesting, informative and amusing as their series itself. After meeting cute in 1970 on Belfast-native Maureen's first week in London, the couple went off on a planned one-year trip through the Far East that ended up with them stranded penniless in Australia, where they decided to publish a short travel guide on Asia that became the basis of their now multinational company. This look back at their almost 40-year career divides neatly into thirds, with the first energetically covering their various travels while they get their business off the ground, such as "incidents in Turkey that began ambiguously and ended with gratuitous acts of kindness"; the second frankly detailing why their early and "often fairly shoddy productions" became popular because they "were still better than anything else around"; and the third refreshingly discussing their current business ventures. Their chapter "All About Guidebooks" serves as an excellent short look at the history and the current state of the travel book market, and they convincingly argue that guidebooks such as theirs have not wrecked once-mysterious locations. (May)

[friendlyskies]

RYP: I'm not disappointed, just surprised that Tony only owns a third of the company now? Is that including Maureen's share? Damn.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with Tony and Maureen so much, on balance I think they've used their lives well. It's certain people they've entrusted the company to who seem willing to compromise tourist safety, not to mention their workforce's wellbeing, to maximize profits. Their health section is now a poorly customized global template, map pages are being cut everywhere, etc. If they're biting off of your market without doing the research, that's irresponsible as well as hypocritical. The empire has perhaps gotten too big for its britches, concentrating on growth rather than quality. And in tourism, quality saves lives (not to mention limbs, friendships and marriages).

Oh well. Just hoping that you can figure out a way to leverage some of your own sales using their marketing dollar, good luck.

[RYP]

I don't have a beef against the Wheelers, I find them humorous and naive. They despised me because I had the audacity to tell people not to use guidebooks and go to places where tourists don't go.

One important point. The Lonely Planet series was remarkable for its lack of knowledge of threats and its absolute ignorance of what they had created by sending thousands of naive college age kids into the arms of waiting con men.
Yes they do have a laughable Dangers and Annoyances section which seems to focus on locals pestering women.

One only has to read their books on "dangerous places" that somehow end up being guides to cheap and cheerful hostels to realize what a disservice they do to their readers and the locals.