My experience is people who carry Lonely Planets are as good as people on a package tour. But they are less able to admit it.

They go the same hotels, same restaurants, see the same sights, take the same buses and bump into the same lonely planet wielding crowd at the next town or on the tour bus that they convince themselves they took "independently".

Then the hotels and hostels that are listed in the LP are full of "local day tours" cause all their customers are the LP tour crowd.

Without a doubt, part of the rise of Adventure Motorcycling over the last 10 years is precisely a backlash at the package tourisation of 21st century backpacking. And the rise of this tourised backpacking is directly a result of the popularisation of Lonely Planet.

The reality is the LP wielders are on a package tour, they just cant see it.

Thats why we do it on bikes. So we can go where we want, when we want. Without having to sit on a stinky 14 hr bus ride with a pain-in-the-@ss college kid from California telling you how cool he is cause he KNOWS Bolivia ... cause he was there 2 weeks ago.

I strongly discourage the use of LP as I feel it completely takes away from both the sense of adventure and the reliance on your wits. Further it minimises your interaction with the locals. That for me is a major element of the whole travel experience. Locals will always help you find a bed / post office / internet if you need it. And the more you immerse yourself with the locals, the more you get out of your travels. Ergo, the less you get out of it if you are packing a LP guide.

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That is quite bold statement!

What's next? People who use maps are all sheep?

That would be because I have developed a very strong opinion on it. What exactly would be the point responding if my opinion was vague and less than developed??

As other posters have noted, as soon as you check into a hotel from the LP, you will surrounded by german, dutch, english, australian, kiwi, canadian and american gap year students and backpackers. Whats the point going to mongolia / peru / pakistan to bump into that?

Maybe if you are travelling solo on the bike and you want to go to place where you know you can have a few drinks with some single western female backpackers?? I suppose thats a reason.

Who said anything about maps? I was talking about books that steer people into the same a tiny handful of restaurants and hotels, and then give them the impression that they are "independent". In particular I was criticising the "backpacker" crowd, who treat these books like bibles.

Where did you get maps from???

At the end of the day, the reality is that the more you use guide books, the less you interact with locals. And as I said before, my view is that its the interactions with the locals that make the trip and the trip's memories.

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I agree with that but hotel listings and restaurants only take small part of the book, there are a lot of other information and useful maps too. I think it does not matter if one carries LP or just asks locals "about the place where backpackers gather" to end up in that place your describe. It is their mind set, not LP guidebook, that drives them to these places.

And I am also using GPS.......... Will I be removed from the HUBB now for beeing to sheepish ?
:-)

I think LP and other books, maps. GPS, internet info, local knowledge etcetera, can all be usefull, depending on how you use them.
Don't follow the LP book or any other book as as your only guide. Don't use your GPS without knowing where you are and where you are going. Don't beleive everything people tell you.
Use your own common sense and make decisions on all the information you have.

That is what I think of it.

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Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a Harley-Davidson FXD Dyna Super Glide

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl

When I went over to cen. Asia I did all my navigation using a bit I had cut out of a world wall map, about 18" wide by 6" tall and it covered from the UK to China, no guidebooks just a collins english-russian dictionary.

I think the pathetic lack of a map actually helped because everytime I stopped and asked for directions the locals found it very amusing and I scored a lot of free tea/food etc on the back of it. Admittedly I was on my own with few time restraints so getting lost wasn't a problem.

I found myself using three 'LP' hostels/B&B's, which were very good but overpriced compared to the derelict former soviet block apartments that litter the area (as long as you don't mind the peeling plaster and cockroaches these are a great way to meet the locals). That said the LP places spoke english and were a welcome haven where I could talk to people without sign-language

Plus LP places are a good way to bump into groups of young ladies backpacking who are all easily impressed by the mad biker..... an obvious bonus!!

I drove between London and Capetown using nothing more than a sun compass and an anemometer made out of two egg cups and sucker sticks.
It took me ages just to get out of the UK, always raining.

When I came back north I rode backwards so I could recognise where I'd been to re-trace my route.

Always surprised by people who ride a Goldwing...............

No need to go to those lengths and such difficult riding tricks: just cut a slot in the back of your helmet, as I intend to do, so that the eyes in the back of my head can take in the salient POIs (Places of Interest I think that TLA means!) .

(Apologies to anyone who is still interested in discussing LP)

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Dave

You too, everyone is doing that these days.

When I came back north I rode backwards so I could recognise where I'd been to re-trace my route.[/quote]

(Markus, I cracked up when I read that one.)


Is LP fine as a guide book? Sure, a lot more mainstream orientated than they used to be but still adequate.

Is using a guide book cheating? Not at all, if it was then we are all cheating in one way or another. IMHO that a guide book just shortens the time you spend screwing around.

As an example, I rode into Allepo, Syria at night sans guidebook or city map. Managed to make into the town center, easy enough but from there it's asking a lot of people who direct you a little bit until you get lost again and have ask for directions.

These aren't modern cities on a grid, they are ancient towns that are spread out higgledy piggedly. Still, kind of fun. After a while I make my way to the hotel part of town - every town has one. From there, I fumble around from ramshackle hotel to ramshackle hotel and find one that has a room and not too many rats. It's a "locals" hotel and I negotiate the room price with the basic Russian I learned from a couple of weeks in Russia (ie not much). This whole exercise takes about two hours.

My neighbor in the hotel is a trucker from Iraq and with the clerk translating, he tells me that I am an American pig. I counter that I am Canadian - like he gives a shit about the subleties of North America vs. America. Still, all good fun and no one gets beaten up in the middle of the night.

Mildly proud of the adventure I am experiencing, in the morning I walk across the street to make sure my bike hasn't been stolen and there are three other bikes parked there. Hmm, what a miracle that they also found this lost world of culture! When we met up later, I asked them where are they staying and how in the world did they get to this area? Easy, they are staying in a hostel a block away and with the little city map in the guidebook it only took them about a half an hour to ride straight there.

So in short they we sitting on a terrace drinking while I was fumbling around like a tourist. We all like adventure, but the guidebooks allow you to eliminate some very time consuming "housekeeping" items of travel so you can put your time to better use and more "true" adventures. I, for one, would prefer to be drinking the cold as you always get more than enough opportunities to get lost

good one, same experience !!! :-))))))))))))

more and more people are travelling, so LP and others adapt. it s a business, market shares, etc ...

they try to please the average traveller or most of the travellers and maybe "we" or some of us are / think they are not the average traveller and don t belong to their target ... that s all.

as people said before you should not maybe take the guidebook as a bible ...

I did backpacking before riding and for sure LP and others are more usefull when backpacking.
i m quite happy with LP, some stuff are wrong sometimes, but like others, like me also !
they update their guides every 2 years for main countries. pakistan or central asia every 4-5 years. no tourist = no business for them (?)

in france, we have "guide du routard" guidebooks, they are also much criticized.

it depends what you expect from a guidebook. if you take everything for granted or if after a while you get more and more away from it.

making a guidebook is not easy at all !!! everyone is travelling different and that s the richness of travelling. including ewan mc gregor.

giving trip advice also, even here, is not easy. i ve tried also on my website (Informations pratiques pour les autres voyageurs) during my trip but i m sure some people won t be ok. + things change.

maybe everyone is ok to say that LP went down.
well the authors are paid for that, it s their job i agree. but i ve heard that most of them are free lance and not paid much.

MY QUESTION would be : WHICH GUIDEBOOKS DO YOU RECOMMEND THEN ???

some guidebooks are also better for this or this region? Some guidebooks don t cover the 5 continents, ...
i ve heard that "let's go" guidebooks are doing better and better

happy trails

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Vincent Danna

* www.va-project.com
Sept 2008 - dec 2009 : Voyage et art contemporain en Amérique du sud.

* http://vincent.danna.free.fr/
2002 - 2004 : Un tour du monde en moto.

Trailblazer stuff, while being quite specialist, always seems v. good. Am going to go with 'Rough Guide' next time I need a general country guide and see how I get on with them.

At the end of the day though, maps are the best guidebooks.

Matt

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http://adventure-writing.blogspot.com

http://scotlandnepal.blogspot.com/

*Disclaimer* - I am not saying my bike is better than your bike. I am not saying my way is better than your way. I am not mocking your religion/politics/other belief system. When reading my post imagine me sitting behind a frothing pint of ale, smiling and offering you a bag of peanuts. This is the sentiment in which my post is made. Please accept it as such!

colebatch,

I think your categorizing people too much here. Not everyone who decides to carry a Lonelyplanet book or similar, is a "package tourist".

Recently rode from Europe to Australia with my girlfriend. We went to lots of countries, that we had never been to before, and knew almost nothing about them.

I found it especially useful, that you can get at least some info about accommodation, when you´ll arrive to some new destination after a hard days riding, and the last thing you want to do is start searching for a place (when theres also a good possibility of ending up in some real rathole for a hotel/guesthouse like, say, in India or Indonesia). Yes, you can check them out yourself, and thats often necessary, too, but the books will still give you some idea, where to look from, and about how much you should spend.

Its also good to know, where there will be plenty of hotels etc. available, and where there will be less so, even if your not going to stay in any of the places covered by the book.

It is true that they are likely to guide people into the same direction, and sometimes the feeling of being in the ' backpacker trail' was quite clear, but we also went to plenty of places that those books knew absolutely nothing about, so didnt have time to really get fed up with that.

I dont think there's anything bad about getting a guidebook to a country that youre not familiar with, and it wont make you a package tourist unless you'll only go where the book tells you to. Going by bike, you'll have plenty of choice.