"There's a formula to [the guidebooks]: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing."I'm not really going to touch on the political issues here - though I do find the suggestion that by visiting North Korea or Burma (before the recent reforms) you can somehow help ameliorate the lives of people living there naive at best. At worst, telling you that you can visit these places without financially supporting brutal regimes is delusional and grossly irresponsible.
By all means visit North Korea (lord knows I want to). But do not delude yourself into thinking that you are somehow going to peel back the heavily restricted official curtain and learn something "true" about regular North Koreans or that your mere presence there will help promote freedom, as if it wafted off of you like the scent of a red, white, and blue rose (Go America!).
But what really gets me about LP is the way that it's positioned itself as the guidebook for "Travelers," as opposed to "tourists," a distinction made in a recent NYTimes piece, "Reclaiming Travel." Travel is deep, and meaningful while Tourism is cheap, thin, and superficial. Lonely Planet promises that their guide will take you beyond the "Tourist traps," and show you the "authentic" side of whatever country you are visiting - that they can give you an "insider's" understanding of a place that you will be spending a week or a month breezing through. In short, that they will make you a "Traveler" not a "Tourist."
But an incident in the edition of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring that D and I bought for our trip through SEAsia drove me nuts. Somewhere in the section on bus travel through Thailand, the authors write something along the lines of the following: (I'm paraphrasing from memory here since the book is either buried in a box in my attic or at D's house):
If you ever find yourself on a long-distance bus in Thailand, and notice that all the Thais are sitting on one side of the bus, don't silently cheer your good fortune at scoring a whole row of seats to yourself. Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all times of day, and you can be sure that the empty side will be scorching hot as soon as you get going. Suck it up and join the locals on the crowded side.Think about this. Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all times of day." Thais are magical, in possession of some mystical knowledge that has been lost to Westerners. They all sit on one side of the bus not because they're hot, but because they have some magical ability that you don't. You know, the magical ability to look at the fucking sky you moron.
This mindset is destructive for a number of reasons. It fails to recognize a culture for what it is. It forces that culture into a box based on the pre-conceived notions of the traveler/guidebook writer (in this case, that Thai = mystical). When people visit a country expecting to have certain "authentic" experiences ("authentic" being something they've defined for themselves before even stepping foot in that country), the tourism market in that country naturally caters to those expectations, whether or not those expectations bear any resemblance to reality. (Which is fine by the way, Thais gotta make a buck).
But this mindset also requires nothing of the traveler. That NYTimes article I spoke about above came fairly close to enraging me though, in principle, I agreed with its recommendations: Get lost, wander around, talk to people, learn something about the place you are visiting and about yourself. These are all things that I try to do when I visit a new place, and things that I think, makes a trip more worthwhile and more fun. So why was I so mad at the NYTimes piece?
It was the way that this Traveler vs Tourist setup is used by LP and others that made me angry. "Traveling" requires people to think - think about yourself, think about where you are, about why the people there do what they do. It is only by thinking that we can learn anything about ourselves or the country we are visiting.
But by telling its readers that Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all hours of the day, LP is telling its readers that they don't have to think. That they can just put everything Thais do (sitting on the same side of the bus) into this pre-conceived "mystical" box, and that's that.
In addition to LP, so much about the "Travel" industry is predicated on showing you what's "authentic" in a country. Eat at this authentic restaurant, go on this trek to that authentic village, look at this authentic temple. This is authentic culture. You don't have to think about anything, because we'll tell you how it is. By selling you on the idea of turning you into a "traveler," these books are just turning you into a tourist.
