The gimmick behind Brian Thacker’s travel tale Tell Them to Get Lost is that his journey is inspired—and guided—by South East Asia on a Shoestring, the first guidebook by Lonely Planet founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler, published in 1975. Beginning at Tony Wheeler’s desk in Melbourne, Thacker travels through East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and Singapore, finishing his journey at the very hotel in which the Wheelers wrote their original guidebook. As a bonus, Tony Wheeler makes an appearance during the Indonesian leg of Thacker’s trip, roping him into a writers’ festival panel at Ubud. This story is very much a tribute to the Wheelers—in particular Tony Wheeler, who becomes Thacker’s role model and is imagined as a bell-bottomed hippy riding a motorcycle through the jungles of Asia. The story also takes a personal turn when Thacker meets a girl during the trip who agrees to travel with him, but is terrified of the bacteria in the substandard hotel beds. She later becomes his wife. Unsurprisingly, Thacker has trouble finding many of the hotels listed in the original guidebook, while those he does find are remarkably unchanged—in the sense that either they are still the quality institutions they were 25 years ago, or that their sheets haven’t been changed for 25 years. Quotes from the original guidebook and the 2010 edition are compared at the beginning of each chapter, and show—hilariously—what has changed and what has unfortunately remained the same. While this book reveals the effects of mass-tourism on a place, it is also interesting to note the effects of a lack of tourism on struggling communities in places such as East Timor, Burma and Samosir Island in Indonesia. This is a fun read from a well-travelled writer.
Andrew Wrathall is publishing assistant at Bookseller+Publisher
