Philosophy of a guidebook guru

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1999 by Tony Wheeler

The man behind Lonely Planet, a guidebook series originally designed for travellers eager to quit the beaten track, defends his record

"Bali was wonderful until your guidebook came along," said a member of the audience, during a talk I gave recently about the pitfalls of tourism. "Why are you sending all those visitors to Burma, don't you know how horrible the government is?" queried another, rather angrily.

Questions like these are raised almost every time I speak about my life as a guidebook publisher. According to this line of reasoning, I should be ashamed of myself for helping to ruin dozens of places round the world, not to mention propping up a string of corrupt regimes. In my view, the situation is rather different.

When my wife Maureen and I founded Lonely Planet Publications over 25 years ago the world was, from a tourism point of view, a much less crowded place. I can easily measure that growth by simply glancing at my bookshelf - our first South East Asia on a Shoestring guidebook covered the region in 144 pages. The latest 10th edition takes 936 pages to do the same job, and if you added up the individual guidebooks we have for countries in the region they would tot up to over 5,000 pages, an information overload no visitor would contemplate carrying around. Maureen and I put that first regional guidebook together in a backstreet Singapore hotel room. Our entire staff could fit into one car to go out for lunch. Today they're scattered around four offices on three continents and it would be standing room only in a 747.

Has big tourism ruined Bali?

We started with a very simple philosophy: we were the small-time operators who couldn't compete head on with the big publishers in London or New York. So we would produce guidebooks to the places nobody had ever thought of writing about. In retrospect it was an amazingly clever idea. By the time the "big guys" had woken up to the tourist boom that was taking off from airports all over the world we had carved out a name for ourselves as publishers for the new destinations suddenly topping the statistics lists. This hard-won reputation gave us the stature to move on to the more established and familiar tourist destinations. Today, however, there are no undiscovered corners. Name the destination and there are probably half a dozen guidebooks about it.

So have we "ruined" Bali and dozens of other untouched paradises? Have we demolished pristine cultures by drowning them in a never-ending flow of tourists? Absolutely not. For a start we're only one influence amongst many. If guidebooks were the huge influence many people seem to assume they must be, airlines would be welcoming me aboard with open arms and upgrading my tickets. In fact I'm just another anonymous "bum on a seat".

While many places have taken off as tourist destinations during the last 25 years, Bali offers a fine example of how the boom arises. Turn the clock back to the 60s and you find a virtually tourist-less Bali - not because we hadn't published a guidebook about the island Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, dubbed "the morning of the world". In fact, the Indonesian government was distinctly unwelcoming to all overseas visitors. But even the subsequent change in government did not suddenly open the floodgates of tourism. Bali didn't take off as a major international destination until airlines started scheduling regular flights, until big hotels were built, until the island's small, specialist image and reputation was disseminated to a mass audience.

Has this leap to big tourism ruined Bali? Well, first of all tourism is not the only agent of change. Recent Asian economic mayhem apart, Indonesia's economy has been on a roll for the past 20 years which Bali has clearly been a part of, whether it's been the green revolution doubling rice output or the cottage industry clothing manufacturing making "made in Bali" a familiar label worldwide. Cultural changes have also taken root independently of those linked to tourism. It's hard to believe that tourism has a tenth of the influence of the Hollywood videos now found in even the most remote corners of the world.

Tread lightly and be culturally aware

So tourism is not the only agent of change but has it had such a terrible impact? Clearly, it's brought in a lot of money. We old Bali hands may regret how much noisier, how much more crowded and modern the island has become. However, I doubt whether you'll find many Balinese complaining. Park the motorcycle and go back to walking to the market? No thanks. Flick the lights off and go back to oil lamps at night? Not a chance. And most important of all, go back to the days when harvests were uncertain and rice shortages were a regular occurrences? Well would you?

Progress does not necessarily take a toll on culture. In fact it's often quite the opposite, and again Bali is a fine example of the positive effects of tourism. The island's much-vaunted artistic skills were essentially moribund when the first Western visitors turned up in the 1930s. They prompted a revival but nothing compared to today's artistic boom. Sure there's a lot of mass market art being churned out but that's just a broad foundation for a smaller output of higher quality work. In Bali tourism has contributed to change but this change has certainly not ruined the place. The dancers may be performing for tourists in hotels rather than the nobility in the palaces but they are still dancing. Quite possibly they wouldn't be if there weren't such a high demand among visitors.