What is wrong with Lonely Planet?

The Lonely Planet guides are overpriced mainly because at least three/quarters of their contents are blah-blah. Take the following sections: “Visas” (how can you get anywhere, even on a plane, to your country of destination without one?); the ubiquituous “Getting There & Away” (it implies that the reader is an idiot who knows how to go to a place but not how to get out of it); the various sections on health and warnings about this and that (every European or American or Aussie who leaves his country to go to the Third World has him/herself vaccinated against any disease for which there exists a vaccine and every one from any part of the world knows that there are parts of cities, even in the First World, where you should not be at night). The page dedicated to “Hitching” says exactly the same thing for every country outside the First World: “Don’t do it”. Basically, the price you pay for a Lonely Planet is like giving money away for being told that you are not very clever. There is, of course, the psychological factor, like that little boy Linus, in Peanuts, that always goes around sucking on his thumb and holding a blanket to his head, which is the sort of comfort a Lonely Planet guide affords lonely tourists in exotic lands. But, caveat emptor, when you buy a Lonely Planet, the information on exchange rates, accommodations, and restaurants is usually outdated.

            The Lonely Planet guides distort history. Obviously, since they seem targetted for people who don’t know any better, these books are frequently inaccurate. Let’s take some examples from the guide to Central Asia.

            “Transoxiana” was not a Roman but a Greek name for what is mostly Uzbekistan today. The Amu Darya river (“Darya” and “river” together mean “river river”) was named Oxus by the Greeks before the Romans had even defeated Carthage.

            “The Indo-Iranians are believed to have passed through Central Asia on their way from their Indo-European homeland in southern Russia.” Please! All Indo-Iranians went east from southern Russia. They did not pass through but settled in Central Asia. The Indo-Iranians who invaded Iran did it from Central Asia.

            It is extremely unlikely that Alexander the Great first reached Kabul then doubled back to Sogdiana.

            Kushana, which did not even have its own chroniclers, cannot be compared politically to Rome or to China.

            The manufacture of silk had spread from China long before 751. The Altai mountains were never a stronghold for Jenghiz Khan, whose homeland was the Orkhon river valley in northern Mongolia.

            However, anybody can make mistakes and, in all fairness, the Lonely Planet guides do not claim to be history books. But what really bugs is the sickening pandering and patronizing.

            Still within the Central Asia sphere, everything that a Lonely Planet writer can say against Russia and the USSR will be said, sometimes at great length or repetitively. Everything that can be said against America is taboo. Take the case of the “basmachis”, the name the Russians applied for Muslim bandits, which is what they were and what “basmachis” means. The Lonely Planet Guide to Central Asia depicts them as heroic mujahidin fighting for their independence against Soviet imposition. That sounds strange. I look at the guide’s date and it is 2000, obviously before 9/11. The writers must have been rueing the day they got carried away by Islamic zeal. But even supposing there were independence fighters among basmachis, Lonely Planteers boxed a text on Enver Pasha as a Turkish palading who went to Central Asian to aid his struggling linguistic cousins. What they do not mention is that Enver Pasha was an Ottoman oppressor of minorities, probably in part responsible for the Armenian genocide, certainly the promoter of the alliance of the Ottomans with Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. He was such a disaster that the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, wanted nothing to do with him, which is why he ended up in Central Asia, and he got there by deceiving the Soviets about his intenstions and later betraying them. Of course, after independence America was trying to rescue the Turks from Russian influence and they sent a “crack” regiment to Ferghana. “Crack” is about right: “cracked up”, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

            The same Lonely Guide planet that we used is brimming with American propaganda and in places reads like a recruiting poster fo the Peace Corps. The irony is that, while it claims that it wants to ease its users into “exotic cultures”, it is doing all it can to make natives seem backward and “weird”, the adjective they used for some ridiculous anecdotes about Almaty or Tashkent (also boxed). Even those repetitive “get there and away” sections hint at that First Worlders need not worry because they always have their safe havens back home.

            The shield behind which Lonely Planeteers hide are the “backpackers”, First World tourists on a budget, usually young people. Are “backpackers” for real? I have seen some clutching their Lonely Planets and looking not just cautious but positively unfriendly and afraid. Another specialty of Lonely Planet are the trekkers. But the only trekkers that go the Central Asia are people with money who carefully arrange their trips back home. So basically, the public for Lonely Planet are middle-class folk who probably buy it because they have no alternative, or perhaps they really believe that it will be useful for finding hotels and restaurants. But on this the help these guides provide is scant. In the chapter on Yssyk Kul, it suggests that its customers go to a babushka anywhere along that lake’s shore and rent a room. Like backpakers are going to do any such thing! The best hotel on Yssyk Kul, which was once a sanatorium, is called Aurora but the Lonely Planet was still calling it a sanatorium, but it did not mention that it has the most elaborate and lovely park of any hotel anywhere, although admittedly the gate is crowned with a monstrous Soviet-era bronze sculpture out of a nightmare.

            To heap insult on injury, the worst of Lonely Planet is the affectation. Not content with reassuring their readers that they can “get there and away”, which implies that no right thinking First Worlder would dream of staying in Central Asia longer than the guides recommend, their writers portray themselves as ho-hum sophisticates that spend all their lives traveling without a thought to their own countries. At one place in the guide to Central Asia the road to Turusart is described as the “sort of absorbing and grandly beautiful trip you’re glad you’ve made once you’ve made it”, but in another part it is described as a “pet peeve”, as if they were crossing it every other day of the week.       

Had enough of Lonely Planet lies and distortions? We don’t think so, but we have had it.