Reading Across Asia on the Cheap, the first guidebook that Tony and Maureen Wheeler wrote and the beginning of the empire that was to become Lonely Planet, I realise that there's only one place they write about that I'd really like to see. And that's 1973.
Forget the emerald Buddha in Bangkok, it's the 'freak bus services' I want (operating from London to Istanbul for around $30), Kabul - that 'fly-in, fly-out tourist trap' - and a Singapore that is 'a groovy place', where Tony - and it's worth bearing in mind that this is a hard-working young man fresh out of business school - advises passing through immigration wearing a 'short-hair wig' and notes that as a modern city, it owes its existence to Sir Stamford Raffles 'who was quite a cat'.
It's a delightful read, in all sorts of ways. There are some ropey hand-drawn cartoons on the front and, at 94 pages, its coverage of half the world - everything that lies between London and Sydney - is perhaps best described as 'concise'.
Still, in Iran, we learn 'the Amir Kabir is the freak bottleneck and has been for some years', Iraq is simply 'a very hard-line socialist Arab country so watch what you say and never mention arch enemies, Iran or Israel' and, comforting this for anyone who's ever been told they arrived too late, in 1973 Bali is already described as over: it 'shows every indication of being rapidly eroded by tourism', the guide says. 'Go soon.'
They simply don't make guidebooks like this any more: the sketchiest of practical information, some of it excitingly criminal - where to score drugs, how to obtain forged ID - artfully combined with frank admissions of total ignorance: 'I'm not too hot on hotels in Iran'. Plus an ever-ready willingness to air personal politics, 'due to the continuing effect of the American charade in South East Asia, travel to other south east Asian countries is either difficult, not recommended or impossible'.
But its canonical status is not because it was a helpful primer on the practicalities of overland travel, but as a generational call to arms. 'All you've got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over,' said Tony Wheeler in his introduction. 'So go.' And then, well, basically, everybody did, all of us, at one time or another, if not for six months on a hippy bus, then two weeks of island-hopping in Greece, as often as not with a Lonely Planet guidebook tucked into our rucksack.
The Wheelers made the overland trip in 1972, arrived in Australia with less than a dollar, and so the story goes, banged out the book 'at their kitchen table'. Last week, it bore ultimate fruition, when they sold a majority stake in the company to the BBC, netting them a reported £63m.
It's big money, but more than that, it's almost certainly the end of one era, and the beginning of another quite different one, although exactly what that might be, nobody's as yet quite sure. Just a few days before the Wheelers' announcement, Mark Ellingham, the founder of Rough Guides, decided to step down from the company that he'd created 25 years ago and subsequently sold to Penguin. And earlier this year, Hilary Bradt, of Bradt guides, retired, as did Charles James, of Vacation Work, both veteran independent publishers who also started out in the early Seventies.
Year on year sales are down: by two per cent last year and a worsening plunge is feared this year. The coming age is of the downloadable pdf; the hand-held device; the guidebook that is tailor-made to fit your trip. The BBC deal is meant to provide the cash to facilitate this for Lonely Planet. It's just hard, looking at my copy of Across Asia on the Cheap, to think that this is where it all began: the ur-text of LP 3.0.
Studying it, there are things that have changed beyond all imagining (RIP dear old poste restante) and yet there's also so much that's familiar here. The basic guidebook structure, the exhortations to watch for dodgy, foreign food, and, when visiting embassies, to look smart and behave yourself ( 'Just why are these countries so uptight? ... Do yourself and everyone else a favour and stay cool.')
It's a legacy of Baedeker's improving Victorian stance, this tendency of guidebook writers to order you about. Oh, they can be such pompous know-it-alls! 'Before you even think about heading out into the hills alone, take advice ... ignore the counsel of well-meaning Beirutis and ask in the villages.' Who wrote that? Oh, yes, that's right, it was me (Travellers' Survival Kit Lebanon 1996, co-authored with my friend, Anna Sutton).'
It's so easy to be pompous. And so enjoyable. Particularly in a travelling context. In a nutshell: the past was better, you should have got there sooner, and you paid how much for it, you fool? If there's any area of modern life that has benefited from new technology and yet in which we resist the notion that it might possibly just be progress, it's travel. It's the prelapsarian ideal we want. No gift shops or touts. Just unsullied nature, and, now you mention it, a charming small hotel with crisp cotton sheets and maybe a nice glass of something chilled.
It's an inconvenient fact that the good old days weren't always. My experience of backpacking in former Soviet hellholes would have been immeasurably transformed with the invention of Couchsurfing, and in the age of Google, Anna and I wouldn't have got away with our more creative touches. At work on a guidebook to Russia & the Republics and at a loss as to how enliven a section on Minsk nightlife, we endowed our friend Isabel Henton with a set of pink performing poodles and made her the star of the Belarusian State Circus.
There's not many jolly japes these days. But then there's also no detracting from Lonely Planet's extraordinary success: it publishes more than 500 titles, has sold 80 million guidebooks, translated into eight or more languages. On the wall of their London office is a framed certificate noting that they have been judged to be a 'Superbrand' and so the story goes, when Bill Clinton went to visit Australia, he requested an audience with the Prime Minister, and 'someone from Lonely Planet'.
I haven't met Maureen but Tony is as mild-mannered and unassuming a multi-millionaire as you could hope to find. Everyone admires them and applauds their achievement. And yet I talk to Hilary Bradt and Mark Ellingham and Charles James, and Bryn Thomas from another small independent, Trailblazer, and James Daunt, of Daunt Books, a specialist travel bookshop, and nobody can resist putting the boot into Lonely Planet just a touch: it's travel publishing's Microsoft.
When I ring Charles James, he tells me that, funnily enough, he's currently reading a book by Pete McCarthy, 'and every few pages, he goes and slags off Lonely Planet and all the sad Lonely Planeters hanging around the hostels, and of course, that delights me no end'.
'I mean have you seen their first book? And ours too ... If you compare what they're doing now with the first books, there's no comparison. They're tremendously good these days whereas back then we had, what? 220 pages and a few scrappy hand-drawn maps? We sold them for £5 which, bearing in mind, this was 30 years ago, was good money, and they just sold terrifically well because there was nothing else out there. For a while, it was absolutely brilliant.'
It was absolutely brilliant, I agree. He gave us a commissioning letter, a very small amount of cash, and off we went to Lebanon with carte blanche. On the telephone, Bryn Thomas tells me of his hell updating Lonely Planet India ('up at dawn, five hotels before breakfast ...') and how curtailed the format was ('it just wasn't much fun writing for them in the end, it was so controlled') whereas Anna and I swanned around with a Blue Guide from 1969, spending weeks tracking down lost temples on the sides of the Bekaa Valley, establishing exactly which was our favourite Beiruti felafel seller, turning up for coffee with Walid Jumblatt, the former warlord, and composing disquisitions on, among other things, the appearance of female newscasters on Hezbollah TV.
It barely sold a copy, of course, what with some slightly bad timing with some rockets and the Israeli army. But still, as I always told Charles, minor quibbles, minor quibbles.
Hilary Bradt, whose company concentrates on the more obscure destinations, published her first book in 1974, a year after the Wheelers did, although she wasn't even aware of the existence of their books at the time. There's no ignoring them now though.
'Everyone asks why we don't do a book on Thailand,' she says. 'In order to have something concrete to say, I counted up the number of Thailand guides in Stanfords the other day, and do you know how many there were? Forty-two. And the world doesn't need 43 guides to Thailand, that's for sure.'
They're still finding destinations, she says, 'but if Lonely Planet comes along and does it, well, it doesn't matter that we have the better book, people just look at the brand. I think they've done terrifically well, it's just hard as a small publisher not to resent it.'
Everybody has a tale to tell about Lonely Planet's quasi-mythical power. There's the apocryphal story, for example, about the Rainbow Lodge. Recommended by Lonely Planet, it boomed. The other guesthouse owners grew jealous. So one hotelier changed his name to Rainbow Lodge. Then another. Until there was a whole street of Rainbow Lodges and busloads of confused backpackers not knowing which way to turn.
'That's not apocryphal,' Tony Wheeler says, when I ask him. 'That happens all the time. All over the place. They're always at it. There was one place in Hanoi where we recommended the Globetrekker agency, and then a Globaltrekker agency appeared, and a Globe Treks agency, and Globetrekker 2.'
He's not an it-was-so-much-better-back-then sort, Tony. Part of this, of course, is that Lonely Planet must be seen to be striding boldly into an age of digital guides but more it seems that he still loves travelling, is a self-described 'obsessive' about it, and still gets a kick out of going somewhere new (he's on 130 countries now 'although Maureen tells me it's absurd to count').
Hilary Bradt, on the other hand, says she misses the 'serendipity' of the old days and, now in her 60s, she thinks 'us older ones' are more adventurous than young people who all use the same guidebook and go to same places 'they follow the pack because they don't feel secure enough although of course when I was 20 I was exactly the same'.
Of course, it's not just that guidebooks have changed in the last three and a half decades, it's that everything has: cheap flights, mobile phones, emails, the internet, nice boutique hotels with quaint original features but tip-top Western plumbing. James Daunt tells me that the latest hot potato to fly off the shelves are the 'Luxe' guides.
'What?' I say. 'Those crappy little things on a concertina-ed bit of paper?' But yes, apparently we've come over a bit Russian and want our luxury above all else. I idly think of setting up Super Sexxxxxy VIP Guides and really cleaning up. The only real link between now and the ideology of Across Asia on the Cheap is in the Sixties' notions of freedom and self-fulfilment that are still the vital ingredient of all travel narratives - both literary and personal - and that these guides were the first to harness, repackage and sell right back to us. And if a book remains a book or becomes a pdf, that's unlikely to change.
It's time, though, perhaps, for the counterculture to move on. Lonely Planet-meets-the-BBC is now the establishment. It's a nationalised industry. It's practically the Queen! Where are the Sex Pistols when you need them? What everyone complains about up to and including Tony Wheeler, is how bland, formulaic, PC, corporate, the books have become. The very first Lonely Planet guide I used was the one to India. 'It's still the one I'm proudest of,' Tony says, a best-seller when it came out in 1980 and it was still the only one to the country by the time that I picked it up in 1989, and slavishly read its every word. What I remember most about it, though, is 'Geoff', or Geoff Crowther, one of the original authors not just of the India guide but the Africa and South American one too, whose author bio showed to have a full beard and a vegetable garden in Australia devoted to exotic herbs.
Whole evenings passed doing Geoff impressions (it was a variation, basically, of Neil, the hippy off the Young Ones): on where to score dope, or get the best view of a certain temple. His opinions were forever butting into the text. So annoying! Yet, somehow, so memorable.
He's gone now. A broken man living in Goa, Tony Wheeler tells me, and it's hard not to feel a pang. Is it a parable, I wonder? Although in the end, I decide it's probably not. The latest edition of Lonely Planet India is a monumental 1,236 pages, produced by 12 writers, and it's, without a doubt, a terrifically useful book if you need to navigate your way from Calcutta to Bangalore; probably even more so when it's a couple of megabytes rather than several kilos of dense matter weighing like a stone at the bottom of your bag. But, well, there's a certain something that's been lost; a Geoffness, I think I'll call it, that joins the scrapheap of travellers' hand-me-downs waiting to be collected at a dusty poste restante, in a land far, far away.
From hippies to hip hotels
The original Seventies backpacker guides used to revel in their countercultural status, sneering at smart hotels and posh restaurants wherever possible. Now, however, 'style guides' are the fastest growing sector of the market.
'Young couples with money buy these cool guides because they are the ones to be seen with,' says Brett Wolstencroft manager of Daunt Books, a specialist travel bookshop in Marylebone.
These are the front-runners:
Hip Hotels: Started the trend of style-focused travel guides; now has more than 15 titles.
Luxe Guides: Pocket-sized and written with acerbic wit.
Hedonist's Guides: Sleek but comprehensive, photo-heavy, quirky destinations.
Nota Bene: A subscription service, costing £235 per year.
Wallpaper City Guides: Smart, snobby and full of travel porn.
Then and now: the changing face of travel
Top backpackers' destinations
1972 Hippie trail to India, Afghanistan and southern Asia. The choice is influenced by psychedelic music and drugs.
2007 Australia is the most popular, thanks to the influence of Aussie soaps. Thailand and Vietnam come next; adventure-seekers head to Latin America and South Korea.
Off limits to travellers
1972 Vietnam, Cambodia, China, USSR.
2007 Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Who goes backpacking?
1972 Only adventurous hippies, and people think they are mad.
2007 Everyone! According to Gapyear.com, 230,00 18-24-year-olds, 90,000 25-35-year-olds and 200,000 55-65-year-olds travel from Britain on a gap year annually. The UK gap-year market is valued at £2.2bn a year; globally it's £5bn.
Cost of flights
1972 Return to New York from London costs £75 (equivalent of £866 today); a round-the-world ticket costs £600 (£5,500 today).
2007 Return to New York costs from £200; a round-the-world ticket costs £600.
On the screen
1972 Travel shows don't exist. Michael Palin is known for Monty Python's Flying Circus.
2007 Tribe, Michael Palin's New Europe, Coast ... travel shows are huge.
Best-sellers
1972 The Joy of Sex is published. Novelist Paul Theroux hasn't yet turned his hand to travel writing.
2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the smash of the year. Travellers read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and spin-off books linked to TV series.
Annual leave
1972 Most of the working population have 15 days off a year, but almost 10 million have 10 days' leave or less.
2007 The government announces an increase in statutory leave to 24 days last week, rising to 28 days in April 2009.
Low-cost flights
1972 British Airways have a near monopoly on flights from the UK. Laker Airways pioneers a 'no-frills' airline model, asking passengers to bring their own food, but it folds in 1982.
2007 There are dozens of no-frills airlines, including Easyjet, Ryanair, Virgin Blue in Australia and Southwest Airlines in the US.
Airport security
1972 US airlines begin mandatory inspection of baggage and passengers.
2007 US fingerprints and scans irises of passengers.
Futuristic travel
1972 Concorde's zenith: more than a dozen airlines place orders.
2007 It is gone, but space flights are on the horizon.