A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday, by Tim Roxborogh.
I display them proudly in my house. They even have their own bookshelves in my study. And every overseas trip I'm on, I lug one of them around in my backpack, trying to keep the pages neat and uncreased because I'm a bit OCD about my books. Especially when it comes to my Lonely Planets.
Somewhere along the line something changed. Something that can probably be condensed down to one word: Wi-Fi. In the days of Nokia phones, where playing the snake game was the most impressive feature and you could only save 100 contacts (meaning you'd have to delete your lowest-ranked friend every time you met someone), travel without a Lonely Planet was unthinkable.
Internet cafes were your lifeline back to the real world and your Lonely Planet your lifesaver in whatever world you'd thrown yourself in to. Even as phone technology changed, Wi-Fi was still often infrequent and the guidebook just as relevant as before.
The writing, so to speak, seemed on the wall though. Before long, where tourists once used to talk to each other using the destination of the Lonely Planet as the pickup line — "Oh, you're heading to Colombia next? Well I can tell you about a great little guesthouse …" — now everyone keeps to themselves and their phones. Perhaps it's psychologically harder to interrupt someone on their phone than someone reading their guidebook.
