What do guidebooks say about your country?

The Atlantic had an article titled Welcome to America, Please Be On Time: What Guide Books Tell Foreign Visitors to the U.S.  It was a little disorienting to read about your own country from the perspective of a foreigner.  When you live in a place where you grow up, it doesn’t occur to you to pick up the tourist literature.  For context, … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (2)  | June 11, 2012
Category: Notes from the collective travel mind, Travel Guidebooks

Possessed by guidebooks: how to exorcise yourself

Travel scientists have unearthed that a human subspecies called backpacker, or traveller, has been observed across many of the furthest flung corners of the globe reading guidebooks more than interacting with locals.

“So do you want to come with me for breakfast?” “Sure! “ “Any preferences? I saw a street stall at the … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (4)  | March 1, 2012
Category: Notes from the collective travel mind, Travel Guidebooks, Vagabonding Advice

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day: a new Ebook from Nomadic Matt

Many Vagablogging readers are familiar with Matt Kepnes, or Nomadic Matt. Kepnes’s website is packed full of information on travel deals, travel tips, travel guides, and loads of interesting travel tales suited to any genre. Now Kepnes has taken the next step and has published his own Ebook.

Kepnes’s book is a smooth read. Even over the details of dollars, budgets, and … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (3)  | April 6, 2011
Category: Money Management, Travel Bargains, Travel Guidebooks, Vagabonding Advice

Wilderness survival guides

A lot of travelers are romanced by the kind of retreat from civilization found in the pages of Henry David Thoreau and Carl G. Jung. Taking a break from our regular lives and living simply in nature is not only personally rewarding, it may be a little more essential to our well being than many may previously have thought.

However, embarking on a journey such as this requires the same amount of research … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (1)  | September 6, 2010
Category: Food and Drink, Simplicity, Travel Guidebooks, Travel Health

Guidebooks go mobile

Looks like the guidebooks are heading for the really small screen: mobile devices. With the soaring popularity of the iPhone and other smartphones, guidebook publishers are moving to take advantage of new platforms, as this AP article describes: Guidebooks adapt to mobile download era.

However, they are running into a common problem in the tech world: compatibility. Mobile networks may not offer the same availability of apps from country to country. The cost of … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (5)  | June 25, 2010
Category: Travel Guidebooks, Travel News, Travel Tech

What do you do with your old guidebooks?

Lonely Planet MonksAt some point in our travel planning, many of us consult a guidebook. How much we each rely on it differs, of course—from those who give a cursory glance early in the process to those who carry it around like a totem from place to place. And some have thrown over guidebooks nearly entirely for Web content.

But however we consume the … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (8)  | May 28, 2010
Category: General, On The Road, Travel Guidebooks

Book review: Lonely Planet Thailand

It’s hard to believe the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand is in its 13th edition; having first graced the shelves of alternative bookstores and organic co-ops in 1982, a full month before the guidebook that started it all, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring (or the ‘Yellow Bible’), hit the stands.  Lonely Planet was a little known mom-and-pop (literally — Maureen and Tony Wheeler started the LP juggernaut in 1973 after an overland trip through … Read more »

Posted by | Comments (6)  | December 15, 2009
Category: Travel Guidebooks