What a contrast to how things were on my recent trip there. The country is firmly on the tourist map and its now a sizeable industry, providing jobs for lots of people. This doesn’t mean that things are better than they were, on the contrary, tourists are now taken for granted, they are just people from whom money must be extracted.On one hand you have the bike and tuk tuk boys from whom the hassle is continuous. They will follow you up the street working on the assumption that if they ask you nine times if you want to rent a motorbike, perhaps the tenth time, you might say yes. On the other hand most of the cities where tourists go there are streets filled with ‘travel agencies’. Many of these copy the names of their more successful rivals – like Sind Cafe but nearly all of them are staffed by young men and women who really don’t care. They were all children when I first visited, and for them tourists have always been there, and in growing numbers – so they’ve never had to try very hard. Their grasp of English is limited to trying to work out what you want, then telling you the price – which is often made up on the spot. Forget getting any kind of description of what you might actually be getting for your money, that’s beyond them. You’d be very unwise to buy a ticket from a travel agency in Vietnam as I found mark ups of 100% +, is fairly normal.

This kind of complacency is also evident in most of the hotels as well, after all you’re dragging them away from their TV watching and mobile phone fiddling. In a country where most of the tourists speak English, you’d have thought that people who deal with  in order to sell them things, might be working on improving their language skills. I came across a couple of girls who tapped me for a free English lesson, but otherwise most people were content to get by with – This is the price, give me the money.

It goes across the board, so expect rental bikes which are rusted pieces of junk, or internet ‘cafes’ where the staff have no idea about computers or how to deliver the services (like burning a CD) that posters on the walls say they provide. Another punter will come through the door – so why bother?

I’m now in Laos, where in the most part people are more interested in looking after tourist needs, as out in the countryside cooking a few banana pancakes is a lot easier than working in a paddy field. However, I’ve now arrived in Luang Prabang, which again I first saw in 1995 when travelers were quite rare, due to the security issues that existed then. Of course things are very different now, the country is safe and firmly on the tourist map and facilities in the lovely town of Luang Prabang have expanded accordingly. All to the good. Except that the people here behave very much like the Vietnamese, as no trip to Laos is complete without visiting Lunag Prabang, so a continual stream of tourists is assured. So here we are again with the indifferent service, the below average food and the ‘can you go away and stop bothering me’ attitude.

At the beginning of this trip I passed through Thailand which also has its pockets of hassle, like Kho Shan Road and on some of the islands. But the Thais have been in the tourist industry a lot longer, and they know that tourists can disappear if things are not to their liking. Most people want a holiday, and not to be asked ‘you buy something in my shop’, every time they walk down the street. Right now, with the global downturn, numbers are down, hotels are in trouble and the Thai Government is handing out free visas in order to get those figures up. They know that they can’t take tourists for granted.

So maybe when the numbers dip in Vietnam the people in the travel industry will work out they are in a global market – and they have to raise their game if they want people to keep on coming. I myself won’t be back.

I’ve never needed a visa before, as the Thai’s used to allow visitors from Western countries to stay for thirty days, more than enough for most people. This has now changed and only visitors arriving by air get thirty days, while people entering the country at the land borders only get fifteen. This is supposedly to cut down on ‘long stayers’, travellers who take up semi permanent residence on a beach and contribute little to the economy, even though there’s no reason why these people couldn’t also fly into the country.

On my next trip I am entering Thailand twice on land borders and will be staying more than two weeks on each occasion, so I now need a visa. As a traveller, I will be criss- crossing the country, spreading my expenditure and putting more of it in locals pockets; benefiting the economy more than the tourists who spend two weeks in a chain hotel in Phuket. They of course fly in and usually only stay two weeks but have the right to stay a month.

Another irony is that Thailand is feeling the effects of the recession and the political unrest earlier in the year, so it’s doing all it can to encourage tourists to come. One of the ways they’ve done this is to scrap the fee for tourist visas over the busy winter season. So having created a situation where more travellers now need to get visas, they now incur the costs of issuing them without gaining any fees! With the problems in Thailand’s government, joined up thinking seems to be off the agenda. 

Butcher wondered if the journey could be repeated again today and he started to make inquiries as to its feasibility. The Congo today has almost become a byword for a failed state, a country beset by lawlessness, with large areas  controlled by warlords whose bands rob and murder at will. Many of the people Butcher contacted thought he was mad to contemplate travelling in the Congo and even the ‘Telegraph’ washed their hands of him, but after a lot of effort he was ready to start his journey.

Being a journalist the book is very well written, compelling reading, the best travel book I’ve read in years (but that’s not saying much). Butcher interweaves his own story with Stanley’s, and with the history of the Congo from it’s discovery, through the colonial period and onto how it became the wreck of a state it is today. Very hard and dangerous travelling, as most of the country’s infrastructure has collapsed, and he was very lucky to get as far as he did. In the end though he had to resort to flying, this is a country where waiting months for transport to move is not uncommon.

After reading the book I was lucky enough to see Mr Butcher give a lecture about this journey at the Royal Geographical Society in March 2009, where he gave an overview of his trip illustrated with pictures, which gave further insights into the situation in the Congo.

He empathized one of the themes in his book, that the world has allowed the Congo, a vast country the size of Europe and containing millions of people to go backwards. During the colonial period the country was connected to the modern world but due to corruption and war the country is now no more developed than when Stanley passed through in the 1890’s. Nature is encroaching again; there is a wonderful scene in the book where Butcher and his motorbike driver stop in the jungle for a rest. Walking around Butcher knocks his toe against something solid, so he drags the vegetation off to discover a rail. He then realizes that in colonial times this jungle track had trains and railway carriages running through it, now it had been completely reclaimed by the forest.

In the book Mr Butcher was very unsympathetic to the Belgian Colonists and it’s true they operated a form of apartheid and people couldn’t move freely without permission.  However in his talk he acknowledged that they did build the only infrastructure the country’s ever had and most crucially they provided the one thing that is now so sorely lacking, the key to development, to everything in fact – the rule of law. He reminded us that the killing goes on, much of it tribal with thousands being killed every month and that this gets almost no coverage in the West.

However there are now new colonialists in the Congo – the Chinese. Of the very few goods that make it into the interior, nearly all of the them are made in China, and that has killed off all the indigenous trade. In their hunger for raw materials the Chinese have done deals (given bribes) to what remains of the functioning government to exploit the country’s mineral wealth. Mr Butcher pointed out that the Chinese are building infrastructure again, but the roads and railways only go to places where the Chinese have an interest, the mines, there is nothing for the people.There’s no doubt that all the machines and material will be imported because the Congo has nothing; but that was the case in Colonial times. In fact the Chinese don’t only bring in their own engineers and managers they also bring in their own labourers, so the Congolese don’t even see the benefit of a few menial jobs. There are thought to be around a million Chinese now working in Africa, taking the jobs from people who only have one asset – their manual labour.

During questions at the end of the lecture Mr Butcher was asked why he thought African countries did not progress after colonialism, while countries in Asia powered ahead. His opinion was that African cannot tolerate success. If an African wins something, or succeeds in business, his neighbours and often his own family will try to take it off him or some how bring him down. He felt that until Africans can look at success as a positive thing, the continent will not progress.

When asked why he thought such a dangerous journey had been successful Butcher felt it was because he had spent a lot of time choosing good guides, they had been the key. He mentioned that he had been contacted by the parents of a traveller who had been in West Africa trying to replicate the journey of Mungo Park. This man has disappeared without trace and even though his parents have been out to Niger distributing leaflets and posters his body will probably never be found. It’s most likely he was the victim of the people he was travelling with. Such is Africa.

Unfortunately, we have been using B & B’s less and less recently as they seem to forgotten that they need to run their businesses to meet their customers needs and not their own. The problem is that many B & B’s insist on a two-night stay over the weekend, so you have to stay (or pay for) either a Friday or Sunday night, even if you only want to stay for Saturday. Some operate this all year round or just bring it in for the summer and are usually unyielding on the issue. They assume that they won’t get a booking just for a Friday or a Sunday so they make you pay for something they think they can’t sell.

As we live in South East England, getting out to the country usually involves a couple of hours driving, something I don’t relish doing on a Friday evening. Likewise, we would never consider driving home on a Monday morning. It’s certainly not something we’re going to do just to keep a B & B happy, or just to feel we’re getting our moneys worth.

Luckily, things are changing in the budget hotel market, with chains like Travelodge and Premiere Inn opening hotels in country towns and city centres. Admittedly, a chain hotel room does not have the same ambiance as most B & B’s, and any breakfast is usually extra, but otherwise the pricing is comparable. Most importantly, they don’t mind how long you stay; just Saturday night is fine with them.

Earlier this year we wanted to stay in Bath, one of England’s foremost tourist cities, but only for the Saturday night. After ringing around eight or nine B & B’s I gave up, all of them insisted on a two-night minimum. Fortunately, Premiere Inn has a hotel a short walk from the centre of the city, with lots of car parking (also a major issue at B & B’s), so we stayed there and had a great time. Ludlow, is a lovely town in Shropshire that we often visit and although it’s awash with B & B’s we have given up on them as they all ask for a two night minimum, so instead we stay at the Travelodge on the edge of the town.

On one occasion I told a B & B owner that I was going to stay at a chain because of the two night rule and he replied ‘that wasn’t much of a B & B experience’. He was right, but as part of that B & B experience involves being ripped off, and being made to pay for something we can’t use, then we’ll take our custom to a company that runs their business for the convenience of their customers and not themselves.

I’m not sure how the B & B industry is faring in the recession, none too well I would imagine. What I do know is that the budget chains are opening hotels as fast as they can pour the concrete, and very often in places like seaside towns where traditionally people would have stayed in a B & B. Maybe when enough B & B’s have gone to the wall, the rest may work it out, by insisting on a two night stay at weekends they are driving what should be loyal customers into the arms of their rivals.

This is not to say it’s highbrow, crime novels and thrillers are also represented and there is a relaxed atmosphere, a place where you select and read a book for half an hour and feel entirely comfortable doing so.

The small coffee shop is not the buggy filled, child screaming hell most bookshop cafes have become. Everyone is reading – books or magazines, the man sitting next to me was busy writing mathematical equations on the back on an envelope.

In short, the LRB Bookshop is a bookshop for intelligent people – why can’t we have more of them instead of the promotion driven, pile ‘em high, tat supermarkets that most bookshops are fast becoming?

As a Traveller and a Bookseller I always assess a new guidebook by looking at a place I know well and seeing if I would agree with the recommendations. So I went straight to the section for the town I live in – St Albans in Hertfordshire.

St Albans has always been in the LP Great Britain guide as it has a lot of historical sights and is an easy day trip out of London. There is less on the city compared to the last edition and there are fewer listings but that seems to be the case for all LP guides, the books are getting thinner.

The main tourist sights are all listed, not in much detail but the book does have a lot of ground to cover, but all the ‘must sees’ are there. What are really interesting are the listings.

For Hotels, there is ‘St Michaels Manor’ a lovely hotel and the second most expensive in the city, with a double around £150 a night. Their second listing ‘The Park’ I had never heard of, it’s a guest house a long way from the centre in one of the most exclusive areas of the city, no house in the road under a million, and only the most determined of travellers would find it. St Albans is not B & B country, but there are smaller and cheaper hotel options around the station and in the centre which are not listed.

For eating, the centre of St Albans is packed with restaurants and bars serving food at all budget levels. LP have included ‘Lussmanns’ again in the new edition, and it’s a firm favourite of mine, right in the centre and serving good food. Again it’s not the cheapest option, and it’s surrounded by chain pizza restaurants, which travellers on a budget might want to head for first. The second listing is ‘Darcys’, Wow, nice place, nice food but dinner for two; you aren’t going to be looking at much change out of £100! Is it in the book because the chef is an Australian?

The author says that St Albans is full of good pubs and s/he is right there. Their pick of the best is ‘The Fighting Cocks’, an old pub built around a cockpit. It’s a short walk out of the centre and one I haven’t been into for years as it’s totally lacking in atmosphere. LP seem to have chosen it because it’s old, yet pubs right in the centre with are equally ancient like ‘The Boot’ or ‘The Cock’, which are full of life, are passed over.

I don’t want to bring up the tired old question of ‘Did the writer visit the place?’ If they did they are certainly have much bigger daily budgets than when I worked at LP. The real question is ‘who is this book aimed at?’ Staying at, and eating in the places this book recommends and you are not going to see any change out of £300 a day, hardly the budget of the backpacker, who used to regard LP as the bible. Is it aimed at BBC executives perhaps?

If St Albans is representative of the rest of the book then LP is trying to appeal to a different kind of traveller. I shall certainly be looking at their other new editions to see if there is a trend – and recommend to customers accordingly. Lonely Planet no longer seems to be aimed at budget travellers.

I hitched extensively in the 70’s and 80’s in Britain and Europe, even getting as far as Istanbul in one school holiday. No one seemed to think it particularly remarkable that a teenager was hitching alone, hundreds of miles from home, or that he was under any particular threat. At that time there were real terrorists about, like the Baader Meinhof gang, who posed as hitch hikers, killed the drivers and stole their cars but there never seemed to be a problem getting a lift in Germany. As soon as I saw a VW or CV5 heading my way I knew I was guaranteed a lift, as they were always driven by students.

I met some fascinating people and encountered unbelievable kindness, great memories. Of course there was the odd occasion where the driver put his hand on my knee but never any serious threat.

Thatcterism and the ‘I’m all right Jack’, ‘Loads of money’ culture of the 80’s killed off hitching in the UK. Selfishness and greed were seen as virtues, so not much has changed there. Added to this we now have the fatuous ‘State of Fear’ where we are encouraged to believe we at a great peril just walking down the street, let alone sharing a car with a stranger.

The truth is that strangers are nearly always just like you, who genuinely want to help you out or just want some conversation on their journey. Unfortunately young people nowadays will never have the chance to discover the world this way with all it’s randomness and real sense of adventure – let alone meet all those fascinating characters. A real pity.