Like Marco Polo

Yangshuo - China's top backpacker destination (photo: Jo Son/Getty).

Millions of people dream of turning their passion into profit. Tony and Maureen Wheeler, founders of the Lonely Planet publishing empire, have lived the dream. Passionate about travel, over 35 years they published a string of guidebooks which tell you how to get to almost anywhere in the world, and when you arrive, where to stay and what to do. Now, the Wheelers have sold most of Lonely Planet to BBC Worldwide (they retain a 25% stake).

In the 1980s Lonely Planet guidebooks became hugely popular, mainly with affluent young westerners who purchased cheap airfares, backpacks, and guidebooks, and jetted off to Istanbul, Chiang Mai and Cuzco. They wore thai-die clothing, acquired a clutch of travel stories, often apocryphal, and assumed worldly airs. Styling themselves as 'travellers' - cool, free-wheeling types, not uncool tourists - they "hung out with the locals", smoked dope, and roughed it on crowded buses and ferries.

The Wheelers' guidebooks were a raging success because they made 'travellers' feel like Marco Polo, while making budget tourism a safe and predictable experience. The guidebooks contained such precise directions - what flea-bitten guest houses to avoid, what buses to catch, how to get to consulate offices - that assistance and comfort were never far away.

Such choreography eliminated much of the mystery of travel. Read the accounts of earlier western travellers, like Alexander Kinglake's Eothern, a book about a journey to the Near East in 1835, and you get a vivid sense of what travel used to be like.

"Night closed in as we entered the great Servian forest. Through this our road was to last for more than a hundred miles. Endless and endless now on either side the tall oaks closed in their ranks, and stood lowering over us, as grim as an army of giants with a thousand years' pay in arrear....

At first our way was in darkness, but after a while the moon got up, and touched the glittering arms and tawny faces of our men with light so pale and mystic, that the watchful Tartar felt bound to look out for demons, and take proper means for keeping them off."

Here, travel is characterized by discomfort, hazard, chance and surprise. It was an enterprise in which people often travelled in armed company. Like the mountaineer, the traveller had an objective. Edward Granville Browne, the English Orientalist, lived in Persia in the 1880s, studying Persian language and culture. Before the Great War, T E Lawrence travelled in Syria and Palestine, studying Crusader castles and taking part in archeological digs.

By contrast, Lonely Planet 'travellers' trod well-worn paths. They participated in a mass form of tourism in which there was no objective, just 'having fun'. They spent most of their time with fellow backpackers, wore the same clothing, ate the same food, and shared the same experiences. 'Travelling' was an oddly insensible activity. Backpackers breezed through Third World countries, blind to chequered histories, oppressive politics, savage economics, and ruined ecosystems, intent only on getting to the next beach, temple or trail and living like kings for next to nothing.

It will be interesting to see if the Wheelers' decision heralds the beginning of the end for backpacking. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism has made tourism in Asia and North Africa seem more hazardous than it was 20 years ago. In Third World countries, poverty, environmental devastation, and the collapse of centralized authority are producing an upsurge in conflict, warlordism and banditry. Backpacking was a phenomenon of the era of cheap and plentiful energy, which allowed jets to shift millions of tourists around the globe. It is unlikely to survive peak oil - the coming fall in global oil production and spiralling energy costs.

Perhaps future travellers will be far fewer in number, more discerning, and, like their 19th century forebears, go in armed company?

Comments

21st-century backpacking, a new business opportunity for corporate mercenary contractors such as Blackwater and Erinys?

[Ortho]

I wrote the previous sentence. I neglected to sign-in properly.

[strategist]

It wouldn't surprise me. Similarly, armed guards on cruise ships, even escort vessels, to protect against pirates. Come to think of it, this could be a further business opportunity - providing convoy escorts to oil tankers passing through narrow pirate infested waters.

Spiegel has an interesting article about Blackwater antics in Afghanistan, which you might be interested in:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,509852,00.html