Travellers' Checks | Lonely Planet’s 18th Southeast Asia on a Shoestring guide out

Lonely Planet will release the latest editions of its four remaining “Shoestring” guides this month. Recalling a time before the travel guide publisher’s seemingly endless stream of bucket-list coffee-table books and “foodie” guides – when it catered only to backpacking budget travellers – these volumes cover Southeast Asia, Europe, South America, and Central America.

The Southeast Asia guide, now in its 18th edition, is the oldest, and dates back to the mid-1970s. Its scrappy but groundbreaking first edition was soon followed by heftier tomes such as the impossibly ambitious Africa on a Shoestring (now in its 13th edition and simply titled Africa), the award-winning India: A Travel Survival Kit (now just India, in its 16th edition) and the aforementioned South America on a Shoestring.

These last three titles came in quick succession, and were all credited to one apparently superhuman writer, Geoff Crowther. A legend among global backpackers, the London-based Crowther had put together the earlier BIT guides, which were written by and for overland travellers in the ’60s and ’70s, and it was actually content from these that first filled the pages of several of Lonely Planet’s best-selling “travel bibles”.

Now sadly devoid of Crowther’s colourful opinions and law-bending travel tips, and more polished – and I dare say more reliable – than their predecessors, the new editions of the Shoestring guides can be previewed and purchased, in full or in PDF format by the chapter, at shop.lonelyplanet.com.

Last night in London I used to ride past The Connaught (right) several times a week when I was a motorbike mes­senger in London, back in the 1980s. Tucked away on a useful short cut between Mayfair’s Berkeley and Grosvenor squares, it was, in those days, a stuffy-looking hotel, with an Edwardian reputation for turning away guests who couldn’t produce adequate references.