It’s been close to two decades since I tried to phase bananas out of my life. Sometime in my teens was when I first saw pictures of marine life suffocated off the shores of Costa Rica because of the sheer quantity of blue plastic bags afloat. Those bags were the detritus of banana plantations, used to protect the yellow potassium bunches from insects and weather. Like America’s use of cheap plastic grocery sacks, the waste made me slightly ill.

But Costa Rica is turning things around. They’re starting to rethink those blue plastic bags as part of an ambitious environmental project. As the BBC reported this week, Costa Rica has become the first developing country to proclaim its desire to become completely carbon-neutral by the year 2021. Last year the government said it planted 5 million new trees, with hopes for 7 million this year, to drastically offset its carbon emissions. They’re working on news ways of addressing transport and integrating renewable energy into people’s lifestyles. And agricultural practices, such as those plastic banana bags, are coming under scrutiny. My father, who runs a Russian coffee roasting business, was blown away two years ago when he toured the coffee plantation his business buys beans from. With water recycling and shade planting, “I’ve never seen anything so efficient,” he said.

Costa Rica was in the vanguard of eco-tourism efforts, and it’s looking like the country will nab more of that market. The BBC report says that over 30% of the country’s land has been given over to national parks, an attraction that makes nature-lovers like me sit up and start searching Expedia for flights to San Jose, preferably with connections to Costa Rica’s Nature Air, the first airline to work towards becoming carbon neutral itself.

This is the sort of home-based environmental policies that travelers can support simply by going there. But I’ll wait on the bananas until they’ve found a way to nab and recycle all that blue plastic.

Lonely Planet guidebook writer Carolyn McCarthy (pictured left) is guest posting for Perceptive Travel today from her home in Puerto Montt, Chile. Carolyn has written travel essays for National Geographic, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Lonely Planet’s Middle of Nowhere anthology, among other publications, and she maintains Carolyn’s Wild Blue Yonder, a blog following her peregrinations through Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, and Yellowstone National Park … among other places. She’s one of my favorite travel writers anywhere, and today she rethinks travelers’ use of guidebook-as-guru after a Chilean hostel owner accused Lonely Planet-toters of being unadventurous.

*****

As the gateway to Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, Puerto Natales receives serious Gore-Tex clad foot traffic. Some 180,000 people per year make it into the park and most hoof it through this small town first. There last week to research a guidebook, I was gathering listings when I found a couple of hostels who preferred to remain off the record.

By the way, this never happens. The literary equivalent is Jonathan Franzen’s refusal to be featured in Oprah’s book club. So, what was up?

They decried outdated information (guides are updated every 2-3 years) and rallied around the general woes of tourism: unsustainable numbers, bad manners and the like. But what disturbed me most was that they deemed Lonely Planet toters unadventurous.

Omar, the owner of XX hostel, used to approach travelers in the bus station. No hard sell, but what he calls “buena onda” (good vibes). “They’d shoo me away saying they had their ‘book,’” he said. Now, he rents out rooms only by word-of-mouth. Omar declared it, “The human chain.”

According to him, guidebook-free folk are open people who want to meet people.

I assessed the situation. Hadn’t he just spent the past ten minutes touring his lodgings only to heap criticism? Maybe I was defensive but he was arrogant. After all, I was there live-in-person, not updating from some distant desk. It isn’t ever as glamorous as it sounds. Research days mean seeing fifteen hostels a day, snuffing out lice, prostitution and basic inferior service. The wrecks I edit out hopefully make shortcuts for the traveler who essentially wants affordable/clean/friendly or will sacrifice one of those aspects for the other. Mostly, I hope to tell it straight.

So, am I doing travelers a disservice? Are they doing themselves one by their reliance on a guidebook?

Many times I’ve heard locals comment on the guidebook as traveler bible. And when I see people scanning it religiously, reading as they walk instead of looking up at the scenery, I sometimes wince.

Maybe it’s not guidebooks but the way they’re sometimes used. Think of the book as a friend, not a guru. Ok, on the first leg of a trip, some guidebook coaching is likely necessary. But as travelers grow more comfortable with new surroundings, I urge them to sometimes put the thing away. Let’s face it. It’s just a book. A subjective account written under the pressure of a deadline, updated every two-to-three years.

Let’s talk expectation. When I traveled Costa Rica with a good friend, I was pretty surprised how much our tastes varied and it wasn’t only in the food. Fresh off the plane, she went gaga over hammocks and fresh fruit and bristled to see a bare bulb in a room. In my experience, the bare bulb was synonymous with budget lodgings and well, if you wanted fresh fruit, you could buy two kilos for a dollar at the corner mart and skip the pricey hotel with the fruit plate breakfast. Regardless, we could have both written two totally different guidebooks from that trip. In all, listings are just ideas.

As someone with an MFA who spends WAY too much time checking the cleanliness of shower rings, I stand by my assessments. And traveling the nooks and crannies of countries that don’t make it to the evening news opens my eyes to bigger patterns. But in case you thought the guidebook knew all the ins and outs—think again.

How do you avoid the traps of a guidebook? It’s easy. Use it when it’s essential, then don’t. Don’t be sucked in by Greatest Hits Lists: what are the chances that your best travel memories will take place within yards of a Natual Wonder? You might want to spend a week in a town that got a two-sentence write up (a sure sign few travelers are there). Stick around one place long enough to make a friend. Let locals tell you their favorite outings and places to eat. Most importantly, find the time to put the guide away and trust your gut.

If that means sleeping at Omar’s in Puerto Natales, tell him hi for me.

–Carolyn McCarthy

As an author, I find a visit to a bookstore is nearly always a depressing experience. So many great books are in the bargain bin because they didn’t sell through the overly optimistic shipment numbers. So many great books aren’t even on the shelves in most of the “superstores” that carry only a fraction of what is listed on Amazon. And as I discover more often than not, most of the physical stores have really lousy travel book sections once you get past the best-selling guidebooks to the most popular areas.

Thankfully, some travel tales take on a life of their own and succeed almost in spite of an industry that seems perpetually 20 years behind in seeing where markets are headed and perpetually slow on the uptake when it comes to how and why people buy what they do. My Exhibit A for this post is a book that riveted me, something I couldn’t put down. A tale that is too bizarre to explain properly, but is truth, not fiction. It came out years ago, but is probably selling better now than it did when released, even if you don’t factor in the used book sales in South American backpacker towns.

I am talking about Marching Powder, subtitled “a true story of friendship, c0caine, and South America’s strangest jail.” Long story short, an Australian traveler named Rusty Young holed up in a Bolivian jail with a British inmate named Thomas McFadden and took down his story, eventually faking it as his human rights lawyer and turning the whole long ordeal into a book.

It’s not a simple story though, since this particular Bolivian jail runs like a pure mix of capitalism and Darwinism, with those who have money and power buying the best cells and running enterprises, while those who came in with nothing either becoming addicts or finding a way to make money doing odd jobs. The prison supplies next to nothing, but in return the prisoners can do what they please, within reason, especially if it makes the guards some extra cash. (Hence some of the best cocaine in all of South America.) Some of the inmates have their whole families living there, like an apartment on the outside, with kids in uniform setting off for school each day.

Marching Powder came out in 2003, but why did I pick it up? Pure word of mouth. I read about it in some person’s comment on a travel message board. Then I saw a film director in a magazine talking about how it was the book he had read lately that had really stuck in his head–four years after release date. So I ordered it from Amazon—I had no illusions that it would be in a retail store and didn’t even look. My wife read it before I got around to it and said, “This weird book you bought is about the most bizarre thing I’ve ever read. It’s fantastic!” Fate won.

The day I started reading it, I was hooked. A week after starting it, I was finished and was kind of bummed. It’s not dazzling prose that gets a Booker Award or some obstacle-overcoming soul-searching that makes it a shoo-in for book clubs. It’s just a damn fine story, told well. In the end, that’s what keeps something in print for years on end while other perfectly crafted pieces whither and die.

The way the publishing business operates, there’s the attempt to make a fortune in the first 90 days and then move on to the next title, so most books like this don’t have a chance. Thankfully we’re in a new world now. a world where my first book The World’s Cheapest Destinations can sell 5,000 copies and get translated into Italian without ever being on a bookshelf, a world where word of mouth can make Marching Powder a book that keeps going and going like the Energizer bunny for years on end. Because of The Long Tail, there is now some justice in the world. Mass market crap with no substance often fades away, while the good stuff people are talking about lives on.

Supposedly some big players are working on a film version of Marching Powder, with names like Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle being bandied about. We shall see.

I’ll just say this straight out, so there’s no confusion: The World Without Us is not a depressing book.

Well, not entirely.

Called “one of the grandest thought experiments of our time” by revered nature/place writer Bill McKibben, The World Without Us sidesteps the calls to action over issues such as global warming and chemical manufacturing, and instead takes us to a place that no human will ever visit: a world in which the entire species has simply disappeared. Not done ourselves in through boiling the place or nuking one another or ingesting too many miniscule plastic grocery bag particles, but just gone.

What would happen? To answer the question, Weisman travels to places that represent the forefront of Industrial Revolution technology, and to places that are the last preserves of what the world looked like without our insatiable need to dominate nature and create waste.

Weisman walks into the Bialowieza Puszcza forest in Poland, virtually the only original ancient forest left in Europe, under constant threat from development. There, he asks how the forests would recover and reclaim their land without humans to constantly cut them back. He flies over Gambe Stream National Park in Tanzania, tracking the paths of elephants whose territory is shrinking in the face of housing development and an explosion of rose farming (note to self: being a person who prefers animals to people, I am never buying flower shop roses again).

He crosses Europe, notes the return of wildlife to the Chernobyl region, pokes around the miles of chemical and gasoline refining plants near Houston (awesome in their massiveness and arrogance), plans out the demise of the Panama Canal without people to maintain its locks, gives readers a glimpse of the precarious and unkown battle of New York City’s workers to keep the megalopolis’s head above water every time it rains, and floats to the great whirlpool of the Pacific where the planet’s millions of plastic grocery sacks, Styrofoam containers, Ziplock sandwich bags, and snippets of clingfilm end up — in short, the Earth’s plastic sewer.

Weisman did not intend this book to be a travel book. It is, as Bill McKibben described, a thought experiment. What will happen to balance out wildlife without the constant sprawl of human suburbs? How long will evolution take to develop a microbe that eats the plastic grocery bags that we each use by the thousands every year with abandon? What happens to a human body in a hermetically sealed, decay-proof coffin? (Answer: I’d rather rot under a tree, thanks.) But it succeeds in doing what the best of travel stories have always done. That is, to make us look at specks of our world in a different light — in this case, the light of what our wasteful natures hath wrought, and how long it would take to unwrought it if nobody were here to shoot the endangered tigers or fix our roofs.

The World Without Us is superbly written and endlessly fascinating. It takes us to corners of the world with little to tell but stories of past existence and the destruction unfettered wilfullness leads to. And how futile our industrial energy becomes when set against our own existence.

It’s a pity that the wilderness it ultimately shows us is one that will never appear in a glossy travel magazine.

(On the book’s website, Weisman has set up a GoogleEarth tour to virtually visit most of the places he traveled to. Along with the usual GoogleEarth perspective, the links give a little history and information about each location.)

Gary Geddes’s journey traversing Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, the Northern Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, and Mexico, following in the footsteps of a fifth-century Buddhist monk named Huishen, should have culminated in a story that held readers spellbound. Instead — and it pains me to criticize a travel book — the most interesting thing about this recently published tome is its lyrical title: Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas.

The concept is fantastic. Following in the footsteps of Huishen, who in the fifth century escaped religious persecution to possibly visit British Columbia long before Christopher Columbus thought he had finally come across India, is an idea to make any publisher jump. It’s a great idea. And Geddes was clearly enthusiastic about Huishen, whom he claims as a thirty-year personal obsession. The travel should have been just as interesting: the trip took Geddes to refugee camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan just before September 11, 2001, and to evocative sections of the Silk Road recently traveled by Colin Thubron.

But any idea can be undermined by a general sense of malaise, which is what haunts Geddes’s book. I started out rooting for him, and I kept trying to rally my attention, but in the meantime found myself skimming entire sections because neither the language nor the experience were enough to hold my attention. Geddes incorporates many elements of good travel writing — dialogue, encounters with locals and other travelers, a good idea, introspection — but just fails to pull them together.

I was left wondering if his own attitude thwarted Geddes’s attempt at an epic journey. When wondering, once again, “what had prompted me to undertake this journey” aside from his interest in Huishen, he observes that, “I am a seasoned, though seldom enthusiastic, traveler. Being on the road heightens my loneliness and, … prompts unfavorable comparisons with the home place. … My ideal version of travel would be to visit exotic places all week long but be back in my own bed on the weekends.”

The sentiment of weariness and frustration is echoed several times throughout the book, and it lies underneath the entire journey, deadening the narrative. A reader can’t get excited about Geddes’s story because, despite his doggedness in seeing his project through, he doesn’t seem terribly excited about it himself.

Being lonely and tired can be themes in a story, too, but the writer has to be willing to give up the narrative line he or she chose in the first place. Geddes refuses to do so, even as it becomes clear that he is unable to pick up Huishen’s tracks anywhere on this long journey. It takes a talented travel writer to realize during their preparatory research that they will not find exactly what they are looking for, but that they can make a story out of what they find instead. Geddes gives us plenty of observations about what he sees, his encounters, and his own mental state, but he fails in the end to pull them together into a thread that will pull readers along.

A good travel book either makes the reader want to see the places for themselves, or makes them feel that they’ve already been. A bad one makes the reader wish they could write the book themselves. Geddes is clearly an accomplished poet. The details he takes in speak of an observer who’s used to paying attention to the small colors and shapes of life that make poetry vivid. Unfortunately, his talents as a poet didn’t translate to either the language or the structure required to make prose gripping.