You don’t know the meaning of world-weary, apparently, until you’ve met Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s kids.
Obligated to trudge alongside their bright, high-stepping parents to the globe’s most godforsaken plague-spots and Europe, theirs is not a put-on expression of boredom. They have been there, done that, and they may well be over it.
Wheeler pere says they tallied up countries recently while wading through the Caribbean. “My daughter had been to 42 countries and my son to 40.
“They’ve enjoyed some trips more than others, though. You can’t do too many museums; they have an expression for it-`templing.’ As in, `Please, we’ve done enough templing for today’ or `I’m templed out.’ “
Variations abound by country. “If you’re in Luxor in Egypt, it would be `tombing.’ `Do, let’s quit tombing and go back to the hotel for a swim.’ “
The Wheelers’ kids are not yet teenagers.
Such is the cost of putting up with parents whose wanderings have been translated over the years into a shelf-full of guidebooks, the popular Lonely Planet series. Twenty years after friends urged them to write down their experiences and itinerary on a trek across Asia, the Wheelers sit at the helm of a pretty decent publishing empire.
By now more than 120 titles have been churned out for the budget-conscious traveler to unusual destinations: Bali and Lombok, Egypt and the Sudan, Madagascar and Comoros, and-one of Tony’s favorites-Yemen. Most are updated every couple of years; their Thailand guide, one of the most popular, is already in its fifth edition.
Beyond do-it-yourself
Lonely Planet keeps offices in Melbourne, San Francisco, London and Paris, employing dozens of editors, researchers and cartographers. No longer do the Wheelers themselves do all the slogging, writing, photographing, map-drawing, collating, stapling, templing and tombing, as they did for that first book, “Asia on a Shoestring.”
But the world is shrinking, and Lonely Planet is running out of stinking malarial backwaters that no one has yet written about. This year, they have uncharacteristically turned their attention to Europe, that most well-trod, overwritten and analyzed destination, the grist of Hemingways and numberless sophisticates and bores.
Perhaps because Lonely Planet is best known for the out-of-the-way, unexpected places, Tony Wheeler zipped through the States recently to talk about Lonely Europe. So he was asked: Aren’t you disgusted with traveling? Wouldn’t you rather plop down on the sofa for a few weeks and watch “Crocodile Dundee” on the VCR over and over again?
“Because I got locked into doing a new edition every two years, sort of this-is-1990-whatever-I-must-go-back-to-Singapore, I started to think, `This is crazy. I’ve set this company up because I like to travel and all I’m doing is going back to the same places.’
“So a few years ago I just said, `I’m not doing that anymore; other people can update my books.’ I still travel and I still enjoy writing, but I prefer to write new things, so I spend a certain amount of time working on new projects. And I like checking out our new books: Did the author do a good job? You really can’t tell until you’ve used it.”
Since the Wheelers cannot be everywhere, Lonely Planet employs writers with expertise and experience in bizarre locales.
Hold the mutton
“We’re doing Mongolia this year for the first time,” says Wheeler, “and the writer came back and said he never wanted to see mutton stew again for the rest of his life. He’d lived on it for three months and lost about 10 pounds.
“I use India like a diet-I know I’m going to lose weight when I’m there. If you’re in the smaller towns, no matter how much money you pay you can’t get good food or lodging, and if you’re traveling really hard and writing, you keep on missing meals anyway. Last time, I was missing meals because I just couldn’t be bothered to eat-it was just too boring and difficult. India can tax your patience like nowhere else.”
On the other hand, Wheeler has found that tales of nastiness in Morocco-which is included in the new “Mediterranean Europe” Shoestring guide, as Lonely Planet has divvied up Europe and adjoining areas into four regions-are a little overdrawn.
“I hadn’t been to Morocco before,” says Wheeler, who did some last-minute updating on the country and road-tested earlier drafts by Lonely Planet writers. “And I’d heard those stories about how they hassle you, and they do a bit. But I think part of it is that because it’s so convenient you get a lot of first-time travelers there and it can be a shock-you’re out of `civilized Europe’ and in the `wilds of Africa.’
“You jump on a ferry in Spain and you’re there in an hour-and-a-half. It’s a thrill in a way, crossing continents in a short boat trip.”
Wheeler says it’s something akin to crossing into one of the more impoverished Mexican border towns. But “anyone who’s been to India isn’t going to be fazed by Morocco. I think the people who complain about it haven’t had much exposure. They need to relax a bit.”
Among the seaside countries, the Mediterranean guide includes France and Italy and thus overlaps with the Western Europe edition. Then there’s the Scandinavian and Baltic Europe guide and Eastern Europe, both of which have been subject to political upheaval.
Keeping up with the breakup
“We had just finished the first go-round of Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall came down and Eastern Europe proceeded to fall apart, so immediately it was hopelessly wrong. It took a major rewrite. East Germany isn’t in Eastern Europe anymore, but we’ve still got it in even though we call it Eastern Germany and say this isn’t a country anymore. And now Yugoslavia has fragmented. It’s a nightmare.
“You certainly have to warn people to what the dangers are. In Sri Lanka, I wrote our book in the late ’70s just as tourism there was taking off. Suddenly everyone was going to Sri Lanka. Then the civil war broke out and the place just went off the map. I went there when things weren’t very good, and all these beautiful beach hotels were completely empty, and the people there who’d put their life savings into tourism were just going crazy. And then last year it took off again.”
When Tony and Maureen Wheeler first set out for Thailand or Burma or wherever, there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of guidebooks to warn them off of areas infested with snakes or Americans, or to steer them away from lethal cuisines and customs, which is why they started writing guidebooks. But guidebooks have mushroomed into an estimated $400 million global business, of which about $20 million belongs to Lonely Planet. There’s the danger that travelers will miss the exotica they’ve covered 3,000 miles to see because their noses are buried in books.
Canny businessman that he is-Wheeler acquired an MBA on the way to a promised job for Ford Motor Co., a job he never started-he won’t go so far as to say throw away that guidebook. “But too often people tend to follow them like a blueprint: `I’ve got to turn right here, go straight ahead, here’s the hotel.’ And that’s a shame, that people don’t wing it often enough.
“I think they should. There are so many places, and you can recommend four or five cheap hotels but there are 20 just as good. Ideally, you’re not really pointing them to those hotels but perhaps to an area, and here’s four or five from that area.
“On the other hand, plenty of people do go farther afield, because we get so many letters saying that you should mention this or that place. We’ve got two people who basically just read all the incoming mail, and the author who goes back to that country can check those places out.”
Busman’s holiday
Particularly memorable correspondence is often quoted verbatim and credited in the Lonely Planet books. Says Wheeler: “Some guy who was a bus driver in London for years went down to Sri Lanka purely because he knew they were running the same buses he used to drive-those old London double-decker buses that were finally taken off the streets and sold to Sri Lanka.
“He followed them down there to see how the buses looked in the tropics, and he wrote a nice little piece about it, which we ran. He was a bit miffed, actually; he felt they weren’t taking good enough care of the buses.”
A far sketchier and vastly more unreliable compendium was the Wheelers’ travel companion two decades ago when they set out to cross Asia, before Lonely Planet was even a glimmer in their eyes.
“There really weren’t any guidebooks,” he recalls, “but there was a thing called the Bit Guide, a sort of London flower-power hippie thing of the late ’60s. If you needed an abortion or a lawyer for your drug bust, Bit was involved in telephone counseling and so on. One of the things they did to raise money was to produce these Bit Guides, which were basically nothing more than people writing back to Bit and saying, `I’ve just gone through India in a hashish haze and I’m still alive, and here’s the hotels I stayed at.’
“You had to go down to the Bit office in London to buy one: You’d knock and someone would crawl to the door, you’d push a pound note under the door and they’d give you a guide. Of course, all the addresses were wrong, so it proved useful and useless at the same time.”
Many continents and hundreds of thousands of miles later-the guy could probably put his frequent flier miles toward a trip to Pluto-Wheeler has not yet exhausted the globe. A guidebook to the U.S. is in the works, probably along the lines of the Europe books, carving up the country into Pacific Northwest, Southwest, Great Lakes States, New England and so on (though Texas and Florida remain problematic and may get their own solo guides).
A recent reunion of London Business School MBA’s put Wheeler back in touch with classmates who are now pulling down hundreds of millions. It left him convinced that he is “having more fun than any of them.” But a doubt lingers.
“The kids could be a problem, later,” he says. “What will they do for excitement? Oh, I don’t know-stay home and play Nintendo for a week perhaps. That’s my son’s ambition.” –
