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Oh the Lonely Planet! For those of you who don’t know, there’s only one guidebook in the whole world good enough to travel with, and that’s the Lonely Planet Guidebook. The others are either pale imitations, or they are geared towards other types of travel: travel with special interests in mind, or travel with a hefty budget. If you’re an Independent Traveler, you’re either traveling with an LP or you don’t travel with a guidebook at all. We’ve tried both, and while it is fun and good to be truly on your own, it can be pretty handy to have a map and the name of a hotel when you arrive at a new place.
There is a certain power that comes with the unique position the LP has carved out for itself. Since everyone’s toting the same guidebook around, travelers tend to end up in the same place.
This is an example of what the LP can do to a place: the latest edition of the Lonely Planet Myanmar has an image of a few monks walking across a teak bridge outside Mandalay. Because of this, a cottage industry has sprung up where fishermen take people out on the water to capture the same picture as the cover. The beach is choked by souvenir salespeople and beer stands. The other evening, we found ourselves in one of those boats, happily sloshing around together with probably 50% of the foreigners in Mandalay.
The sunset? It was beautiful. Almost like the cover of the Lonely Planet.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 2:04 am and is filed under Myanmar (Burma). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
About Us
You know the saying, “to fly by the seat of your pants?” Well, that's been our philosophy for most of our adult lives – before and after meeting, falling in love and marrying. We're now taking that idea on an extended round-the-world trip. Follow us as we share the good, the bad and the downright nasty of life on the road.
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