Following the original Lonely Planet

stuff.co.nz - 17/09/2011

For decades, travellers worldwide have been carrying the all-encompassing 'traveller's bible' that is a Lonely Planet guidebook in their backpacks. They take them overseas and even into their own backyards for up-to-date information and advice on the best places to sleep, eat and visit.

Yet Brian Thacker has done things more than a little differently to the rest of the pack. He borrowed the original 1975 South-East Asia on a Shoestring from Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler and used it as his only guidebook.
Forget what's trendy along the Banana Pancake Trail now, Thacker wanted to find out what was still left and who was still around - minus the bell-bottoms.
And what an adventure he had. He broke bread with a gang of ravenous rats, swam with a goat-eating crocodile and got hopelessly lost while traipsing through Portuguese Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and Singapore.
Thacker followed in the footsteps of Tony and Maureen Wheeler for his latest travel narrative Tell Them to Get Lost. Thacker, who's visited 77 countries, is the author of six other travel books, which include tales about being a tour leader around Europe and couch surfing around the world.
The idea for Tell Them to Get Lost came when he and Tony Wheeler were at a book signing. After discovering that no one had used the 1975 guidebook to travel with decades after it was written, Thacker asked to borrow the original. A month later the pair met up and Wheeler regaled Thacker with memories of the regions he'd visited and people he'd met.
During Thacker's trip, for which he did no planning, he became hopelessly lost on a number of occasions. In Dili, in East Timor, the maps in the old guidebook didn't have street names and the places that were listed no longer existed, Thacker said.
"I was disorientated or lost, you could say, quite often; there's lots of walking around in circles," he laughs.
Over the 12-week adventure Thacker became obsessed with tracking down guesthouses and restaurants that were listed in that first shoestring book.
Full piece at stuff.co.nz