Lonely Planet at 30

12.29.03 | 9:46 PM ET

I was exploring the Malaysian port city of Melaka a couple of years ago with the help of a Lonely Planet guidebook when I spotted the Loony Planet café.

It was a modest restaurant on a busy street, and its sign featured the same globe-shaped logo and bubbly lower-case letters as my guidebook cover. The café was clearly the work of local entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on, and have a little fun with, the popular guidebook brand. I was amused.

I never would have expected to see a Malaysian cafe named after a guidebook publisher based thousands of miles away whose mission was to recommend hotels and restaurants in far-flung places just like this. It was, I thought, a bizarre travel-publishing spin on life imitating art. Loony planet, indeed.

I found myself recalling the café recently because the year drawing to a close marks the 30th anniversary of Lonely Planet, the Australia-based publisher whose densely packed guidebooks have accompanied millions of travelers to the far corners of the earth, dispensing advice, offering historical perspective and even providing basic literary companionship in moments of need.

Before arriving in Malaysia, I had understood that Lonely Planet was making a unique impact on world travel. But the Loony Planet café helped put that impact in perspective.

I can’t imagine a café named after another guidebook company. Few other guidebook publishers—few other publishers, period—have inspired the loyal following and sense of community that Lonely Planet has cultivated in so many parts of the world in its three decades. Countless die-hard travelers swear by the company’s guidance. Over the years, in fact, Lonely Planet has sold more than 50 million books.

Many of those same travelers frequent LonelyPlanet.com, the publisher’s encyclopedic Web site, which features the most vibrant travel-related bulletin board on the Internet. Visitors post more than 35,000 messages a month in The Thorn Tree, debating politics and culture and seeking travel companions with messages like this one, which appeared recently:

“Anyone planning some serious trekking in Kyrchistan, Mongolia, Northern Pakistan???? Period: June-August 2004.”

The note specified a couple of high peaks and an urge to keep costs down. It concluded with, “Drop me a line if seriously interested.” On LonelyPlanet.com, that request just might get some serious responses.

These travelers are drawn to Lonely Planet for the same reason I was when I packed my first Lonely Planet guidebook to Europe a decade ago. Beyond the books’ well-researched information, travelers are seduced by the simple but powerful message that inspired the first guide and continues to inspire many recent titles, too.

That message is this: The world is a big, fascinating place, and if you’re so inclined, you can see it on your own. What’s more, you don’t have to spend a fortune to do it. Often, if you travel on local buses and trains, stay in pensions and eat in mom-and-pop restaurants, you will learn more about the world and its people than if you traveled on tourist coaches, stayed in familiar Western chains and ate in hotel restaurants. And if, before you go, you read a bit about the country, its history and people, you will probably come to respect and appreciate the unique qualities they bring to the world. You just might return home a changed person.

It’s a message that has launched a million journeys.

I don’t mean to suggest that Lonely Planet invented thoughtful budget travel. In recent decades, many other guidebooks have promoted the joys of frugal journeys. Arthur Frommer’s “Europe on $5 a Day,” published in 1957, became a classic. But Lonely Planet combined that sensible approach with a wildly adventurous spirit and an appreciation for foreign cultures in a way that was, and still is, perfectly suited to the times.

In the early 1970s, a generation of Westerners was awakening to a world beyond its borders. Young men and women had seen the Beatles go to India and hang with the Maharishi. They read ‘50s Beat novels celebrating Zen-loving, train-hopping dharma bums. On television every night, they watched the war unfold in Vietnam, feeling a range of emotions, but also developing simple curiosity about parts of the globe that suddenly didn’t seem so far away.

Other forces were at work, too: In 1969, the first jumbo jet took flight, connecting more travelers to more distant lands than ever before.

The planet, in a way, was shrinking.

Enter Tony and Maureen Wheeler. Like many other adventurous young souls at the time, the British couple set out on the so-called Hippie Trail across Asia, “driving, bussing, hitching, sailing and railing their way from England to Australia,” according to the story of Lonely Planet, re-told in every book. After the trip, the couple sat down at a kitchen table and wrote and stapled together their first guidebook, “Across Asia on the Cheap.” It was, according to the company, the first modern guide to Asia published in any language.

With that, the Lonely Planet empire was born. Its earliest titles featured off-the-beaten-track destinations that would come to define the company and seal its reputation among seasoned travelers. “Across Asia on the Cheap” begat “Southeast Asia on a Shoestring,” which begat “Trekking in the Himalayas.” In the ensuing decades, the company became the first to publish guides to a number of distant places, including Peru, Bolivia, East Timor and Antarctica.

More than 600 titles are now in print. Travelers can find a Lonely Planet guide to every country recognized by the United Nations except one: the tiny island nation of Comoros off Madagascar. The islands, as it happens, are often referred to as the “Forgotten Islands.” But Lonely Planet is on the case: The country will be covered in a guide to Madagascar due out in June.

Other guidebook publishers have had an impact on independent travel, of course. Rough Guides and Moon Handbooks have both covered far-flung countries, and often very well. But no other company catering to independent travelers has rivaled Lonely Planet in its widespread following, adventurous approach and global reach.

Even Rick Steves, who has inspired many Americans to travel abroad with his popular guidebooks and his public television series, is unequivocal in his appreciation.

“I’m a big fan,” he told me recently. “Whenever I go outside Europe, I use a Lonely Planet book. I like their commitment to get-your-fingers-dirty travel in local cultures.”

Lonely Planet’s success has not come without a fair amount of criticism, however.

In some places, including much of Asia, the guidebooks are so popular that readers following their advice can find themselves crossing paths with the same Lonely Planet-carrying travelers drawn to the same hotels again and again. In China, a country so huge I imagined one could never meet the same traveler twice, I ran into one couple, their well-worn Lonely Planet guidebook in hand, four times in four distant cities. In Malaysia, I became so tired of seeing the same travelers I stepped off a train in a town I’d never heard of to spend the night, simply because the place didn’t appear in my Lonely Planet book.

As the narrator of Alex Garland’s novel “The Beach” rants, “Set up in Bali, Koh Phangan, Koh Tao, Boracay, and the hordes are bound to follow. There’s no way you can keep it out of Lonely Planet, and once that happens it’s countdown to doomsday.”

Others have complained that too many independent travelers, including more than a few Lonely Planet adherents, are stingy to a fault. They spend thousands of dollars to fly to ever more distant lands untouched by the West, only to alight among poverty-stricken peasants and haggle over the cost of a $4 room. These travelers, the complaint goes, spread Western culture without sharing their wealth among people who could benefit from it the most. They take too much and give too little and leave the places they visit only worse for the wear.

The criticism has some merit. One can undoubtedly find these travelers and backpacker ghettos all over the world, from Asia to Africa to South America. But Lonely Planet is not to blame; travelers themselves are to blame. They have choices. In any case, they are still the exception. They don’t truly characterize independent travel today.

At its best, independent travel changes the way we see the world. And it alters the way we see ourselves in the world. We come to see the globe as a fragile place, and its citizens as people not all that different from ourselves. Over time, we become better citizens, not just of our own countries, but of the world. First, however, we must take a leap of faith, pack our bags and go.

Lonely Planet’s guidebooks have encouraged millions of people to do just that, and to do so with care.

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