Lara DunstonThomas Kohnstamm’s book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? was released yesterday, and despite Lonely Planet’s author fraud scandal and the ensuing furor, very few book reviews or follow-up stories have yet to appear. Is everyone just over it all? Here are a couple worth reading: travel writer Robert Reid’s The worst guidebook writer ever?’ … Read more about Fraud or flawed?
If there’s one destination above all else in the world where you want to explore alone, and don’t want to be tagging along behind a blathering guide – or want a guide trailing along behind you (read this post for an explanation) – it’s the Dead Cities of Syria. Serjilla, Al Bara, Jerada, and Ruweiha … Read more about Doing it alone at the Dead Cities
Guides, as I wondered in my last post, who uses them? My aversion to hiring guides is largely due to the distance they put between me and my travel experience. I mean, think back to the last time you had a truly memorable travel moment. The first time you saw the Giza Pyramids, Palmyra, Baalbek … Read more about Guides: getting in the way of a good travel experience
Guides. How many people use them I wonder. Do you? And I don’t mean travel guidebooks. Nor the guides who take package tour groups around. And not the specialist guides who lead treks through mountains, jungles, glaciers and other hard-to-get places we might not otherwise have access to. I mean the personal guides who people … Read more about Guides: who needs them?
If you’ve been following the Lonely Planet author fraud scandal or the Thomas Kohnstamm Affair as some of us like to call it, and you’ve read the comments following online articles and visited Lonely Planet’s travellers’ forum Thorn Tree, then you may well think this spells the end for guidebook authors. Or at the very … Read more about Death of the (guidebook) author?