The Lonely Planet Guide Books
Week 12 (September 23, 2002)

      A few years ago, my wife and I arrived in Bucharest from Bulgaria by train on Christmas Eve without the benefit of my passport -- a careless official at the Romanian border had taken it into his office and forgot to return it to me when the train started up again. I knew I was in big trouble. Rolling into Bucharest, we were met by the Chief of Police, a man with an ironic smile and a trenchcoat who looked almost exactly like Anthony Hopkins, the actor. From that point on I figured we were in a movie . . . hopefully a movie with a happy ending.
Such are the joys and perils of traveling independently without a tour guide to arrange things. Alas, we did not speak a word of Romanian, a language with roots in classical Latin, nor did we have a single "leu," the local currency. Everything was closed due to the holiday, and matters were not looking good. Just for good measure, Christmas Eve happens to be my birthday, and I sensed there would be no cake for me that night in a Bucharest jail.

     How did we get out of such a fix? Well, Anthony Hopkins, bless his soul, turned out to be a most civilized chief of policeman with a good knowledge of French, which my wife, Gail, also happens to speak. One of his detectives very nicely changed some American dollars for us on the black market, since all the banks were shut, and from there we were in the gravy: We had come equipped with a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe, chock full of maps and vital information, including telephone numbers, addresses for various lodging choices and restaurants, and prices we should expect to pay. By the time night fell -- and a cold, snowy night it was! -- we were comfortably ensconced in a guest room in an apartment owned by an enterprising Bucharest woman, who cooked a five-course dinner for us complete with Romanian champagne.
There are a huge number of guide book series published -- Berlitz, Let's Go, Fodor's, Baedeker, just to name a few. But the Lonely Planet series is the one you'll see sticking out of the backpack of every young traveler . . . and even some of us not-so-young travelers. With the Lonely Planet to guide you, you can show up without a reservation in Bali or Bombay, Crete or Calcutta -- even California -- and make your own way. The series was begun by two young travelers in 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who chronicled their own adventures across Europe and Asia to Australia, and today there probably isn't a single spot on our poor globe where the Lonely Planet won't gladly take you.

     So you want to vacation this year in Antarctica? Yes, Lonely Planet has an Antarctica edition. Or perhaps you just want a Tibetan phrasebook -- they have that as well. Or maybe what you want is "Trekking in the Karakoram and Hindukush," or "Walking in Ireland," or "Bushwhacking in Australia." To some extent, the Lonely Planet books have changed the world, making once-obscure places accessible to the traveling hordes. On New Years Eve of 2000, the millennium bash, Gail and I happened to be in an oasis in the Sahara Desert -- the Siwa Oasis, a very beautiful place where we had been lured by the Lonely Planet Guide to Egypt . . .only to find lots of other foreigners like ourselves, wandering from hotels to restaurants to ancient monuments, all of us with the same traveler's bible in hand.

     The Lonely Planet books always start off with a history of the place where you happen to be, whether it's Beijing or Boston, and then go on to give you information about required visas, transportation, culture, museums, food, lodging, language, dangers, even what sort of electrical current you will encounter in order to plug in your laptop or razor. In my experience, it's fun to go it alone, without a tour guide, to be free to explore on your own, and the Lonely Planet books make this possible. Generally, the prices are a bit out of date with every guide book I have ever encountered, but this series will give your some parameters and set your feet in the right direction. In the end, getting lost is half the fun, but with the Lonely Planet you are at least likely to be found again.

     So go for it! The world is your oyster!