First it was the Americans with ‘Vietnamisation’. Now theres a bunch of Aussies and Septics who are wrecking the country with ‘LonelyPlanetisation’. They have LonelyPlanneted the place to death. ‘ Le guide du voyageur indépendant’ my arse. You get on your tour bus where your cadre, sorry, tour-guide gives you some information about the attrocities (or temples) you are going to visit. Everyone on the bus whips out their ‘Lonely Planets’, their ‘geoPlaneta Lonelissimos’, their ‘Planetisches Gelonesomeskeit’. And they check the details. Except for those of use unfortunate enough to be able to remember the articles verbatim. We try to forget, so that next time we meet someone, we don’t spew out the guidebook to them as a knee jerk reaction.
Then we get off the coach, where we are given the opportunity to buy local goods for local people, from new local shops which have sprung up around the coach resting points. There, these independent travellers look at their books to figure out how to test if the goods are authentic enough to be hung up in a cabinet in their hallways back in Baden-Baden. How fortunate, the shopkeepers know exactly how they are going to be tested by these canny independent travellers, and their goods, which really could be used to plough fields / keep the sun off / kill pygmies, miraculously pass the Lonely Planet tests. It’s like some syllabus for shopkeepers. And if there’s a food place with a good write up in the independent travellers’ bible, lo and behold, many food shops change their names to match. What the Mohammed El Fayed are our independents to do? They might have to try their luck, or make a decision on their own.
I think the Lonely Planet books are fine, even useful. In fact, I really enjoyed all of the blinkered tours on offer from Vietnam that they recommend. Certainly beats having to think about things – just remember a time to wake up and they do the rest. I like not thinking. The tours and the book have a synergistic effect on tourists in Vietnam – you keep meeting the same French people wherever you go. But aside from the same French people at every stop, the obvious, accessible ‘scene’ in Vietnam, the one that the book lays out for you, is great. But these travellers aren’t independent. Independent from what? Certainly not the book. Not even from the state-controlled tour operators. Independent from any unguided thought maybe.
At any rate, as long as you don’t meet one of those people who ‘went there before the guidebooks’, back when ‘it was really unspoilt’, then I guess you’re doing alright.