Overguiding: notes from a gilded cage
Digital was supposed to liberate travel. Once, travel was about putting yourself out there. You went to a new place, and you figured stuff out. You got things wrong. You paid too much. Maybe you carried a guidebook – but they were sketchy at best. Hand-drawn maps. Skimpy on the detail (the 1987 Lonely Planet…
Read Full Post
Wind and spiders
It’s been a scatty week, with not much chance to think straight, let alone blog straight. I’m now back in Switzerland, on the final research trip to update my Rough Guide to Switzerland, looking out at the Baroque facade of the cathedral in Solothurn – it’s a humid summer evening and there’s an electric storm…
Read Full Post
“It’s not a disaster”
As announced on Monday in The Bookseller, Penguin is to make 100 people at its London headquarters redundant, shunting them out into a depressed job market with one hand, while maintaining with the other that, “The market is alright, it’s not a disaster, this really isn’t about how we are trading.” Baloney! It may not…
Read Full Post
A little less lonely
Just picked up the new Lonely Planet Middle East book, 6th edition, May 2009. Pretty much exactly the same page-count as the previous edition (700-odd), but coverage has shrunk to the core Turkey-to-Egypt countries plus Iraq – there chiefly for the Kurdistan section. Libya and Iran have both been left out this time – quite rightly;…