The Lonely Planet Story by Maureen and Tony Wheeler. Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, September 2010.
It’s every traveller’s dream isn’t it? To make a living out of your love, never having to hold down a proper job, being a permanent tourist of the world. Darn that couple who destroyed our hopes by doing it first, before most of us even drew breath. They ruined it for everyone. OK, fine, so they’re kind of our saviours who we bow down to every time we stumble off the overnight train, dirty and desperate and looking for somewhere to crash (even though we totally would’ve come up with the idea of Lonely Planet ourselves… if it didn’t already exist).
Brilliant idea on Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s part – they took off over three continents in a rickety old minivan back in the 70s. When they finally made it to Australia (Sydney to be precise) with just 27 cents in their pockets, Lonely Planet was born out of sheer desperation to make a buck. Yes they got jobs as waiters etc to tide them over but the gist of it is the market was ripe for a travel guidebook at the time (there were very few of them around) and the Wheelers were just in the position to capitalise on that.
Of course the company took many years to take off, the pair put in an incredible amount of hard work and spent countless sleepless nights worrying about their little enterprise (there’s a bit much moaning about that in the book for my liking actually.) But hello? They got to travel for work! The experiences they had are every aspiring wayfarer’s fantasy. Pity the book doesn’t focus on that more then. Yes it was interesting to hear about the way the company was built from the ground up, but I got the feeling Tony (the whole book is narrated by him apart from tiny snippets by Maureen) was using the memoir to hit back at criticism, justify decisions and get stuff off his chest that the average reader just doesn’t care about.
A defence is provided for the company’s decision to write a guide book about Burma (Lonely Planet, and Tony in particular copped some seriously bad press for that), why they and their authors never accept free flights or upgrades and why the Wheelers sold part of their company (this was at the time of publishing – the whole company is now owned by BBC World). These anecdotes are delivered relentlessly, paragraph after paragraph with no apparent relation to one another and no effort to give them even a semblance of connection. It gets tedious after a while.
The book partly lives up to expectations – the first half is an excellent, inspiring travel account that makes you want to quit your job right now and take off. But the second half is horribly disjointed, and frankly, makes for clunky and difficult reading. You’re left wondering when the story is going to pick up again, but unfortunately it never does. I would’ve loved to hear more from Maureen too.
I’ve been rather harsh but The Lonely Planet Story is worth the read for the travel stories alone (especially if you’re trying to save for your next big trip – it’ll motivate you). Feel free to ditch it once it starts getting boring though because it doesn’t get better.
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