|  We've been traveling for hundreds of thousands of years, but we've only been buying books that tell us where to go for about two. Pausanias' Description of Greece, published around A.D. 160, is the world's oldest surviving guidebook, a 10-volume treatise on where to stay, what to eat, and which gods and goddesses to check out when you're in that neck of the woods.
These days, travelers can buy a guidebook to every single country recognized by the U.N.—192 at last count—and the shelves of Amazon.com are chock-full of thousands of titles marketed toward independent travelers. But how "independent" can we be when we're buying someone else's opinions on where to go?
Thomas Kohnstamm's memoir,
Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, asks just that question.
The book is a chronicle of Kohnstamm's time spent as a writer for Lonely Planet. In it, he narrates a number of personal traveling shenanigans, including a sexual encounter with a waitress (allegedly resulting in a good review for her restaurant) and an episode of impromptu drug dealing to supplement his meager author advance. It also includes less titillating complaints against the company's unrealistic deadlines, low fees, and lack of support when he was on the road.
Kohnstamm's argument is not that guidebooks are useless, of course—just that they are flawed. What purpose, then, should these books serve? Kohnstamm wants us to remember to use them as helpful tools and not as a "paint-by-the-numbers approach to following the rutted backpacker trail through x developing country." Perhaps guidebooks should be used less to guide us around than to prod or nudge us along, providing just enough ammunition to get there, get settled, and then get out to explore the world on our own. Traveling with a book in your hand means you might miss out on the simple, enlightening experience of discovering something for yourself—which is the whole reason many of us board a plane, ship, or bus in the first place.
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