Let's Not Go

It's been some time since I relied on guides such as Let's Go and Guide du Routard; the Lonely Planet volumes held up better as one outgrew the backpacker/student mindset, but it's been a while since I've bought any of them, either.

And probably will be quite a while longer, too, after this story:

A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.

Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn't travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because "they didn't pay me enough," The Daily Telegraph reported.

"I wrote the book in San Francisco [California]," he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. "I got the information from a chick I was dating -- an intern in the Colombian Consulate."

Via Roger Simon, who comments in passing:

. . . funny thing, there was this supposedly great Pho joint in Phuket I traveled fifty miles for... and it turned out be a laundromat

In my experience, beyond the issue of out of date, garbled, or possibly badly plagiarized information, the youth-oriented budget guides' notions of what constituted good food often drastically differed from my own.

UPDATE: A must-read followup on the issues raised by this flap. Excerpt:

I spent a very pleasurable evening over beers in China with a fellow guidebook writer perhaps a year ago. We swapped amusing guidebook disaster stories for hours to the horror of a group of backpackers who shared the bar with us. Finally, he confided in me how, on one particular rush job for a guidebook publisher I won't name, he briefly visited a large lake in the far north of China. "I wrote in the book, 'Nice lake, take a walk around it,' " he told me. "Problem was, half of it turned out to be in North Korea, and the first person who did, ended up in prison."

Posted by David on April 15, 2008 9:25 AM