Tim Roxborogh's travel bugs: Forgetting to use my beloved Lonely Planet collection

Hotel attendant opening door. Photo / Getty Images

A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday, by Tim Roxborogh.

I display them proudly in my house. They even have their own bookshelves in my study. And every overseas trip I'm on, I lug one of them around in my backpack, trying to keep the pages neat and uncreased because I'm a bit OCD about my books. Especially when it comes to my Lonely Planets.

Somewhere along the line something changed. Something that can probably be condensed down to one word: Wi-Fi. In the days of Nokia phones, where playing the snake game was the most impressive feature and you could only save 100 contacts (meaning you'd have to delete your lowest-ranked friend every time you met someone), travel without a Lonely Planet was unthinkable.

Internet cafes were your lifeline back to the real world and your Lonely Planet your lifesaver in whatever world you'd thrown yourself in to. Even as phone technology changed, Wi-Fi was still often infrequent and the guidebook just as relevant as before.

The writing, so to speak, seemed on the wall though. Before long, where tourists once used to talk to each other using the destination of the Lonely Planet as the pickup line — "Oh, you're heading to Colombia next? Well I can tell you about a great little guesthouse …" — now everyone keeps to themselves and their phones. Perhaps it's psychologically harder to interrupt someone on their phone than someone reading their guidebook.

Fast-forward to my most recent overseas trip, where my wife and I were Nemo-searching, jungle-trekking, river-cruising, orangutan-spotting and mega-mall hopping across Malaysia. All the while my Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet sat in the bottom of my pack. I was Googling every destination, but for the first time in my adult travelling life, I wasn't using the book.

Then we bumped into an Aussie couple in Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, who gave us a recommendation for where we were headed next. "You have to go to this rooftop restaurant called Balin. It's on top of an old hotel, has great views, amazing cocktails and desserts and is the best place to eat in Sandakan."

Wow! How did they find out about this place? Thanking the couple by saying how lucky we were to cross paths with them or we would've never discovered Balin, they responded by saying: "It was in Lonely Planet." So it was. I checked it myself.

All of this made me a bit sad. What had I become! So I made myself start reading my glorious Lonely Planets again, even now I'm home. And it turns out predictions of their demise may have been premature. Yes, sales of guidebooks did slump in the early part of this decade, but since Lonely Planet's hotshot young CEO Daniel Houghton (29 years old) took over in 2013, print sales have rebounded by 27 per cent*. A greater focus may be online, but for some reason people decided they did like books after all. Maybe they just needed reminding.

*Forbes.com, January 2017.

Not getting thanked for holding doors open

Quick rant time. Breakfast buffet, the beautifully refurbished Parkroyal Hotel in Penang, Malaysia the setting. I've just walked from the outdoor patio area back inside to the food and I spot a man, most likely a Saudi tourist, carrying plates in each hand striding towards me. He's about five seconds away, but I do the right thing: I decide to act like a staff member and hold the door open for him.

One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand … I count how long I'm holding the door because he's some distance from me and this is now a particularly generous act on my part. As he walks through the door I smile and he looks at me blankly as he carries on past, his plates piled high with breakfast.

I can't believe it. He doesn't say thanks. We're both tourists and it's unlikely he mistook a blonde, curly-haired white man in shorts and jandals for staff at a Malaysian hotel.

So I sarcastically barked, "You're welcome!" and felt a surge of adrenaline to make me wish I'd get smart with strangers on a more regular basis.

Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB's The Two, Coast Soul on Coast and writes the RoxboroghReport.com

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