Lonely Planets Really Took Me Places

It was the age of adventure.

I was 30, unmarried and earning a salary.

Adventure Uno was built around a Lonely Planet India 1993 edition which took my friend Mr. Porter and me into Rajasthan and Kashmir in October 1994.

A story is going to unfold here… but it starts off with trying to find my sister who had also flown in - but from London - in the much busier and much bigger than expected Connaught Place, Delhi. The story involves a negotiating a Bubonic Plague outbreak, but it ends happily enough.

The travel bug was caught. By now I am married and living in Singapore (no children). Victoria and I start to research a move to the UK overland. This China LP 1996 edition was used to research and plan a future 1999 China overland.

Half the fun of a trip is the imagining of it by the research one undertakes beforehand, so these books were well used. It is almost inconceivable now but when we set off from Singapore, Victoria and I carried LP guides for: South East Asia, China, Pakistan Iran and Turkey. Yep, we were heavy.

China was made to look like a pretty hair-raising experience by the writers of this edition - and to be sure the toilets were something of a shock by comparison with Laotian tiled WCs - but our experience of the 1999 version of China was by some distance easier than the 1996 LP led us to believe. Mind you, China was going through change at such a rate that no book could ever be expected to be an accurate portrayal other than at the time of first drafting.

I’m keeping my old Lonely Planets all together on a travel bookshelf; they tell me something about how I use to dream about travelling rough and the joy of anticipating future treks across unknown lands.

Maybe, when our two young ones are independent of us, Victoria and I will pick up the bug again, shave our heads and go east!