Lonely Planet Trail

In the Selma biography, there is an excerpt from a letter she wrote in 1895 when traveling through Italy: “Don’t you find it hilarious that I am drifting around day after day with a blue guidebook in my hand, stopping in every corner to read? I find it ridiculous, but the rest of the world does the same”. Looking up at my bookshelf with its dozens of Lonely Planet paperbacks, I guess not much has changed over the years. Everywhere from Australia to Zanzibar, I have found myself on the Lonely Planet trail, running into the same people again and again over the course of a day, and I somehow doubt that the Baedeker trail was any less predictable.