I thought guidebooks were dead. Then I picked up an old, second-hand one

March 25, 2026 — 5:00am

The first guidebook I used was either a Rough or Lonely Planet variety, a small piece of comfort in the uncomfortable experience of an early solo trip abroad. It took me to what was billed as the best bar in Hanoi but when I got there, the bar was empty. I was sitting alone, awkwardly sipping my beer, waiting until another clueless backpacker turned up clutching the same book.

He took one look at me and walked straight back out the door.

I finished my beer, tossed my first (and for a time, last) guidebook in the bin, and my travels were all the better for it. You see, travel changes too quickly, especially now, to be captured by a lumbering machine of a guidebook. What is here today is gone tomorrow, swept away on tides of budget airlines, a weakening yen, and the rising standard of living in the developing parts of the world.

There’s no longer any need to waste precious space in your backpack on a guidebook. Not with devices linking you to Instagram, travel influencers, and blogs that inundate your feed whenever you ask how to get from Pakse to Phnom Penh. While I don’t bemoan the demise of guidebooks, I do feel a pang of sadness for what it represents: the end of a magical period in travel.

There was nothing quite like scrawling down directions to your hostel in Barcelona and trying to decipher your hieroglyphics at 2am. Or that feeling of stumbling across a remarkable bar without checking to see how many stars it has on Google first. It felt like you were still discovering something, as opposed to being a passenger to an experience that is already laid out in front of you.

But my ambivalence towards guidebooks changed when I found a dog-eared copy of Lonely Planet’s South-East Asia on a shoestring in a sleepy street library. It was from 2008, a year I spent the most formative months of my life in South-East Asia. It was there I started to feel confident in my own skin, defaced that skin with a tattoo, and left little pieces of myself in places far away.

Out of nostalgia, I grabbed this guidebook, flipped through the pages, and fell in love with it. The way it captured travel in a moment was brilliant, but it was the notes in the margins that made it priceless. The previous owner had left tracks for me to follow and for a brief, blissful moment, I got to share the joy they felt when they planned their trip.

They took a cooking class in Chiang Mai. Then they hiked the tea plantations in Mae Salong, went caving (no thanks) near the border of Myanmar, and did “lots of ancient stuff” in Sukhothai. They jumped off waterfalls in Kanchanaburi and as I followed their trail, it made me think I would have liked this person. I would have shared a cigarette with them at a border crossing or a beer on the balcony of a ramshackle beach bungalow.

Reliving their past travels has made collecting old guidebooks my new kink. I’m all over op-shops, sniffing them out and inflicting endless suffering on my wife’s well-curated bookshelf, all to experience these travel memories trapped in amber.

It’s a reminder that the true beauty of a guidebook is not about telling you where to go or how to get there. It’s about dreaming of the possibilities between the pages. Guidebooks open a window to the world and while they’ll never articulate what’s on the other side, they’ll give you all the encouragement you need to jump right through it.