How we would love watching their reactions and imagined perils. Even better, lets strand Michael Palin on a desert island with nothing but a collection of Monty Python videos for company. What people want, and what these successful guidebooks offer, is convenience dressed up as adventure. The innocent young person could not walk out on a midsummer morning, as Laurie Lee did in the 1930s, and wander around Europe living off his earnings from busking with a violin. Sadly, and against the supposed direction of developing societies, the world is a much more dangerous place to live in now than it was then.
British hotels specialise in it through the ridiculous pricing of their rooms.
The guidebooks are helping to sell us a lifestyle part of that middle-class norm that we all supposedly aspire to is now a fundamental right to at least one exotic holiday a year. Everyone yearns to go somewhere unique or different, for status or genuine interest. But at the fundamental level, there is little difference between the coach-load of elderly American tourists being ferried from sight to sight, and the trail of backpackers all with the same guidebooks, taking the same buses, staying in the same hotels, eating in the same restaurants. Instead of a guide holding your hand, there is a guidebook in it. The conformity remains, no matter how much window-dressing of independence is put on it.