Lonely??

The book I am reading is the story of the magnificent people behind the name 'lonely planet.' Once While traveling: the lonely planet story, details the adventures of Tony and Maureen Wheeler. The book recalls their trials and tribulations in establishing, writing, editing, adventuring, trekking, researching and documenting their books - my favorite reference, when contemplating ventures to interesting and phenomenally fantastic destinations.

I haven't traveled a great deal, however, my sister is a weathered traveler. If she doesn't fall into that category yet, she is making an effort to ensure that in a few years she will. Her collection of lonely planet books is extensive. If she actually reads this blog, she will realise that the book I am reading is one of hers, I have 'borrowed.' I will then receive an abusive phone call. As Sarah frequently informs me, however, she is far too busy to read the blog. This book is more than an entertaining and informative autobiographical account of the efforts of the Wheeler's to start a small business which has expanded to the corporate form that it is today. It divulges stories, and enlightens the reader as to many of the characters the couple have crossed paths with in their travels. Moreover, it shows how two individuals met and made Melbourne their home. It also reveals how these two applied, and to still go to great lengths to practice and implement, a work ethic that someone like me appreciates!

Here are some of my favorite extracts (reproduced, under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act - hopefully)

On silently observing the lonely planet's market infiltration:
"in late 1972 we had just twenty-seven cents between us. Now we had a business known all over the world, our books were on sale in almost every country we visited, and my informal aircraft surveys (walking down the aisle to see what people were reading) always turned up a few Lonely Planet guides. We may have been far smaller, but Qantas and Foster's were probably the only other Australian brand names which reached as many corners of the earth as we did."

On becoming Australian citizens, and the changing cultural dynamics of Richmond, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia:
"It was an indication of how Australia was changing that Maureen and I were the only Anglo-Saxons stepping forward that night at the Richmond town hall. A few years earlier in Richmond, the most Greek suburb of the 3rd largest Greek city on earth (only Athens and Thessaloniki have more Greeks than Melbourne), it would probably have been Greeks who predominated, but now they too were I the minority. Most of our fellow 'new Australians' were Vietnamese. "

Hotel wildlife (a new term)
"Cockroaches are, of course, the other renowned hotel wildlife. New York hotels of a certain style always have them, but Big Apple cockroaches are miserable specimens, flyweights compared to the Asian heavyweight contenders. There's a simple test to determine if a cockroach is the real thing; jump on it. If, after you've applied your full weight, concentrated on one foot and from at least a half-metre above floor level, the cockroach reels back slightly stunned, shakes three legs on one side and then three legs on the other, before continuing about its business, you know you've met a real cockroach. A messy brown carcass lying dead and squashed on the floor is just a bug."

An interesting perspective:
"In early 1990, just twelve months before the Kuwait version of the Gulf War, we made our first trip to the Middle East. It was a trip where preconceptions were knocked over even before we arrived at our destination. We flew from Singapore to Amman in Jordon with Royal Jordanina Airlines and as the DC10 leveled out over Malaysia the captain ame on the intercom to brief us on the flight ahead. It was a woman.
'So this is how it's going to be,' I thought. 'In the Arab world women can't drive cars, but they can fly wide-bodied jets.'


Another interesting perspective:
"That spell in Bali and Indonesia was overlaid by a great unease. In mid-January 1991, on a Kuta Beach bar television, I watched the first air strikes on Iraq - the Gulf War kicked-off. I remember being profoundly depressed by the whole miserable affair in the following weeks I scribbled notes about how I hate 'the gun-ho jingoism, the endless hype and cruise missiles flying straight through windows.' Surely Saddam was a lously, cruel, greedy mindless dictator, but we were defending Kuwait, a slack, fat, lazy, corrupt, boys' club where after it was all over, the slug -like Emir wouldn't even come back to his palace until the air-conditioning had been reconnected and the water was flowing properly.....We were also defending Saudi Arabia, a place where they're so ashamed of the nepotistic little Islamic paradise they've created that they keep the doors firmly shut to ensure nobody gets in to see what they've done.
Our won greed came into it as well. Would we have been rushing to defend everything that was right if right didn't hold the keys to the oil wells? I doubted it in 1991 and in 2003 I was even more doubtful.
In February, I walked the Overland Track from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Claire in Tasmania with four friends. Its a beautiful, wild and rugged walk, made even finer on that occasion by a week of flawlessly benign weather in a region famous for weather as ruggedly uncomfortable as the terrain. It was wonderful, but all the time Gulf War hovered in the background, creating a feeling of unease that would persist until the one-sided force ground to a halt. It would be ten years later, when two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York, before I would feel so utterly disheartened again."


About half way through the book, so the extracts above are obviously from what I have read. What puzzles me is how they came up with the name lonely planet?' I haven't got to this part yet. The impression I have from the book, however, is that the world really isn't that lonely after all.

The lonely planet