The Good Old Travel Guide Days

I flat out loved writing guidebooks. Even in the "ordinary" destinations it was always interesting, and many of our guidebooks, like Burma, required a writer willing to go "to the end of the road." Lots of our writers were willing to do just that. In 2006, I was at a party in Paris with our French language partners. Jean-Bernard Carillet, a French writer whom I had worked with on a guide to French Polynesia, turned up and came over to me excitedly: "I'm just back from Africa, I got into Somalia!" OK, it was Somaliland, the "safer" bit of Somalia, but it was clearly a thrill that there was another corner of Africa where a Lonely Planet writer had at least set foot. I often used Africa as a useful measure of how intrepid our writers could be. We repeatedly warned them that we didn't want them going anywhere dangerous, and yet, with every new edition, there were never more than a handful of countries from the 50-odd that make up Africa where nobody had been.

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2013/08/03/the-good-old-travel-guide-days/