BRIAN GRUBER

Why was Lonely Planet founded? You were there in the early days.

 

JOE CUMMINGS

Tony Wheeler went from London to Australia overland in ’73, and from that trip he put together the first mimeographed, stapled-together version of Across Asia on the Cheap, selling it on street corners in Australia.

 

BRIAN GRUBER

There was someone who created a mimeographed document that attained mythic status. You’d go into Kabul or Tehran and you’d find copies of the thing.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
There was another guide back then too, called BIT, run by Australian Geoff Crowther, who later joined up with Wheeler.

 

When I first came in ’77 to Thailand, there hadn’t been any English language guidebooks since 1928. And, when I left Thailand to go back to the States in ’79, I traveled through Asia, to India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, planned but didn’t go to Burma, and I picked up these two guidebooks. He (Tony) had distribution by that time and the first two country guides were Sri Lanka and Burma, very small. Tony wrote both of those. After the hostage crisis ended the great Asia Trail, he replaced Across Asia on the Cheap with Southeast Asia on a Shoestring.

 

I immediately recognized LP guides as a new paradigm. I had grown up traveling around Europe, based in France with my family and using the more strait-laced Fielding’s and Fodor’s guides.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
What was new about it?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
It was the first series for those who traveled on a budget and off the beaten track. You could use any guide and figure out a way to make it, but this was going to obscure places, not the main tourist routes, and closer to local cultures.

 

In the first Thailand guide, for example, I wrote about where to get the best Thai stick. Within a few editions, Lonely Planet had already started to become more bourgeois and they dropped the drug references. It was just an alternative, in all kinds of ways.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
What did Lonely Planet mean to you, that brand name?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
That we’ve only got one planet to live on. It was still kind of an obscure brand, very roughly put together. I wrote to them and said, I’d like to do one on Thailand, I know it very well, I’ve read the Thailand chapter in South East Asia on a Shoestring, it’s pretty good, but there’s a lot more to see. He sent me nine thousand bucks to do the first edition. I got lost, what was the question?

 

BRIAN GRUBER
We talked about what Lonely Planet meant.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
I asked Tony about this. He was listening to a famous Joe Cocker hit back around that time, mid-’70s. And in that accent of his, Cocker says “lovely planet.” Tony misunderstood, he heard it as “lonely planet.” He took it from that song, he just thought it sounded cool. So, he didn’t have a concept in mind.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
How do you get your arms around an assignment like that? Thailand’s a big place. I think you said the first was ’81 or ’82…

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Eighty-one, yeah, I did the research in ’81 and it came out in ’82. Yeah, I just travelled my ass off and I did that forever. Most of my
research was original. I read a lot, but most of it I got firsthand. My Master’s degree was in Southeast Asian Studies, with a focus on Art History and Thai Language. So, I hit what I thought were all the major temple sites. And then I went to the beaches. I went to Samui and Phangan for the first time in ’81 and a few other islands. I have a slide I took that year on Haad Rin in Koh Phangan, using a telephoto, where there’s a farang girl in a bikini walking away from the camera, and nothing but palm trees in all directions. It was in the first guide. It ran just 128 pages. It was kind of scattershot. I was taking all the local red and orange buses back then, no aircon buses, and carrying just one yaam (Thai-style cloth shoulder bag).

 

BRIAN GRUBER
You went to Phangan on that trip. What were you expecting?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
I took a longtail boat from Bophut. I saw it on a map. I hadn’t heard of it but, while I was in Samui, some of the backpackers would say, “Ah, you think this is cool, you should check out Phangan,” and I was, like, how can it be better than this? Samui was a fucking paradise. They said, well, it’s more of the same, a little more rugged, more hills and virtually no paved roads. There might have been one from the pier to Ban Kai or Baan Tai and then it was dirt all the way down Haad Rin and all the way north across the island.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
What did you find there?

 

JOE CUMMINGS

Nothing.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Nothing? No bungalows?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Very few. There were like ten people there. It was the last three months of my MA program. I was doing field research at the same time, so I was able to dovetail my field research with the first LP Thailand guide. I spent a lot of time in the south anyway because my subject was Ajahn Buddhadasa the famous monk and founder of Wat Suan Mokkh. He died in ’93, but he’s super-venerated now, and there’s a big international meditation center next to the temple. I spent six weeks with him and so I got to know Surat Thani and Nakhon Si Thammarat. And I went to Phatthalung because I had a Thai friend I knew from America, from grad school, his family said come visit. I stayed with his family, everyone lived in their rice mill. It was amazing. Yeah, everything was just kind of undiscovered.

 

The way I would research stuff without written references, maybe I’m on the way, say, to Phanom Rung, the famous Khmer ruins way up in Isaan, Buri Ram, and I’d stop—you can only travel so far in one day—and go to a night market. I’d talk, I’d drink some whiskey with the locals, and say, “What’s to see around town?” And they’d say, “There’s a great waterfall outside; I’ll take you there tomorrow morning on the back of my motorcycle.” Along the way I’d find a few restaurants. There were virtually no English menus, but I knew Thai pretty well by then.

 

One of my secret references for a long time was the late Thai food critic Thanadsri Svasti, whose son is McDang, today a famous TV chef. His father was really objective. He did a series of columns in Bangkok’s Siam Rath newspaper in Thai. Once a year, he published a volume collecting all of his reviews. They were just hole-in-the-walls, all over Thailand, and always amazing.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Those people who you met on Samui in ’81, after the closing of that Asia route with the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. People were carrying around copies of Herman Hesse, Siddhartha, A Journey to the East. Why were these kids coming East at that time?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
It started in the mid-’70s. Eastern mysticism kind of got into the counterculture in the west, with young people looking for meaning outside their own societies. Nowadays, the Asia travel scene is much more party- oriented. I noticed the trend really start to shift in the early 2000s, with people’s motivations for traveling in Thailand. It went from the inner search to the party search.

 

You hardly meet people like that anymore. It was like half the backpackers, whether they said it or not, whether they even knew it or not, were on a spiritual or inner quest of some kind.

 

And leaving these villages, people seemed so happy, even though they had nothing. Of course, that was a bit of a facade. That was just the way Thais are. They don’t show suffering, they don’t make it obvious. They keep it in and put a nice face on it. And they’re satisfied with their lot in life. I think they were looking exactly for that.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Talking to some people, like Nathan Parker and Gill Beddows, there seemed to be a kind of intersection between those two things. Gill used the term “detox, retox,” Nathan used the term “full spectrum,” where people who came to Phangan wanted all of that. They wanted to party on the beach, they wanted free love, they wanted hallucinogens, they wanted to study Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, they wanted organic or cruelty-free food. So, you can have cheap whiskey buckets on the beach…

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Or yoga centers. There’s only one place where Westerners congregated to learn something. There were a few monks like Buddhadasa but very few people knew about them. There was a yoga center in Bangkok run by a guy named Hardy Stockmann, a really important figure, completely unknown now. He was a cool guy, a writer too. He’s since passed away, but he wrote a lot about eastern art; he was an actor, he was the first western Muay Thai expert, he actually wrote a lot about Muay Thai, way before anyone else. I did a book on Muay Thai years later.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
How long were you doing those books for Lonely Planet?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Twenty-five years, ’81 to 2006.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Wow. Long time.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
And I did many other books. Of the LP guides, I did five that were completely original, from scratch. Then I was updating the others. I did Myanmar from ’86 to ’98. I got blacklisted in ’98, so I couldn’t go back until 2011. The original Bangkok, Thailand’s Islands & Beaches, Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand, the original Laos. I was also updating for hire on Indonesia, China, Philippines a little bit; I did one trip to the Philippines for Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. Everything in Southeast Asia except Vietnam and Cambodia.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Tell me why visitors to Thailand would pick up your Lonely Planet guide.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
It got to the point where Lonely Planet was the source of information. Now it isn’t, but there’s so many competing sources, there’s the internet. Now information is crowdsourced. There was no competition, zero. Rough Guides didn’t come out till later, they were the closest. Rough and Moon. They were much smaller, as their expansion from country to country was much slower. Lonely Planet was just miles ahead. They were constantly doing new countries. I remember they finally did India. Nepal was the second one. They did Sri Lanka and Burma, which were already out when I started, in ’79. Also, a little later in ’82, Trekking in Nepal. There were about 10 of us on royalties. I used to make $1 a book plus a $50,000 advance for every edition.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
It was the only guide if you were coming to this part of the world?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
And it was the maps. Tony was kind of a techie, information-oriented guy. His last job before doing Lonely Planet was with British Airways, but not in administration, it was on the tech side. His father was in that business. He traveled as a child like I did, following his father around the world, in different positions. He filled them with maps. No one else had the maps. People said, “Oh, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining that little hole-in-the-wall restaurant,” but I actually found that people just ate in restaurants near their guesthouse, they never really followed the guide. I never saw people following my restaurant guides. People have all kinds of assumptions but, no, the maps were the thing.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
From that first edition in ’82, Samui and Phangan saw exponential growth.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Numbers just kept going up.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Samui with the building of the airport.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Yep, ’89. And things changed really quickly after that.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
That of course brought in a lot of investment for development.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Yep, it changed pretty fast, same thing in Pai. I went to Pai in ’81 too, I was a regular visitor, I bought a property there. And it was the paving of the road in ’93 that did it for Pai. Then Pai got an airport too. I still don’t think that affects it much. Twelve-seat planes from Chiang Mai only bring so many people in. But the paving of the road in ’93, you can get to Pai from Chiang Mai in two and a half hours; it used to take all day. Unpaved, dangerous road, there were bandits, you couldn’t drive at night. There were bandits all over rural Thailand.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Tell me about bandits.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
At one point, there were 10,000 armed guerrillas. Communist guerrillas, the People’s Liberation Army of Thailand was everywhere. There were so many provinces you couldn’t go. You went to a small town, you were taking a chance but you could go there in the daytime.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Where were the guerrillas concentrated?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
In the northeast and the north. Nong Khai was pretty safe, because they had a lot of army, worried about Laos invading. Along the Cambodian border same thing, a lot of army because they were worried about the Viet Cong. Before the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia), there were lots of infiltrations of Vietnamese. And so that wasn’t safe. There were snipers at night even in Nong Khai. I remember you wouldn’t go next to the river at night because it might get you shot. Much of the north and northeast had strong communist encampments, especially Tak, Kamphaeng Phet, Phitsanulok, Phichit, and Nan in the north and Sakon Nakhon, Nakhon Phanom, Ubon Ratchathani, Khon Kaen and Loei in the northeast. Thailand’s last armed communist squadron surrendered in 1989, in Betong in Yala.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Before the Full Moon Party became notorious, there was a scene starting to develop on Phangan?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
The first one I want to was ’89, with maybe a thousand people. People say it started in ’87. (When I returned) in ’98, it was pretty fucking big. There were four different music sources on the beach, so it was a cacophony of overlapping parties.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
How many people do you recall?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Twelve thousand, I was told then. I remember sitting up on Hippie Hill, up on the esplanade. That was a place to chill, they still had mushrooms and joints going around. Jamiroquai, I forget his real name, was sitting at the table with some people smoking a joint.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
What was the appeal of the islands in those early days?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Back in ’81, I remember going to Chaweng. There was only a handful of places to stay, simple wood and bamboo thatch. When I came back, I stayed in Bophut for a few nights, there were actually more places to stay. There were a half dozen in Chaweng and maybe 10 around Bophut, the big center. Every guesthouse had a table heaped this high with mushrooms, and you just helped yourself.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
All you can eat.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Either free or minimal. Bongs on the table. In Phuket, when I was there in the ’70s, there was a bong on every table and they would just stock it all night, like ashtrays. The police just ignored it.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Why did they ignore it?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
They didn’t care. And ganja was kind of accepted. You know, all the fisherman smoked, you could go out on the pier and you could smell the smoke coming off the boats, you could buy it everywhere. Patpong (Bangkok), you could buy it in the late seventies. You’d walk down, go to a girly bar, on the way some guy would offer you Thai sticks for 25 baht, really strong Thai stick. Nana Plaza didn’t exist, Soi Cowboy was just getting going in the late seventies but there was this place called City Bar on Sukhumvit where they were selling heroin openly. My first experience with heroin was there. A guy sitting by the door offered it, saying “number four, number four,” and the smallest you could buy was three grams for $15. Amphetamines, you could go to in any pharmacy in Thailand and buy tablets over the counter. Giant jars with brown, white, black letters. Bigger letters said Central Nervous Stimulant, smaller letters, methamphetamine hydrocholoride. Little white tablets, they were so strong. I was like, wow, here’s my chance to try this, so I bought two or three tabs to help me stay awake in the afternoon while I was studying Thai. I took half of one that first afternoon and I was awake for two and a half days. I threw the rest of them away, ‘cause they were way too strong for me.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
We talked a little bit about The Beach, the Alex Garland book, and you said you actually preferred the movie. That book, which is no great literature, struck a chord somehow. Some backpacker ethos at that time that not only resonated with people who were traveling, it encouraged other people to hit the road. What do you think he did that struck that chord?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Well, I think… well… one big thing. To me, he crystallized a feeling that was beginning to happen. And… when was that, that was ’90 something, right?

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Ninety-six, movie came out a few years later.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Lonely Planet was mega successful and it was sort of a reaction. By that time, people had enough of Lonely Planet. The people that thought they were the coolest, there was always a vanguard, I was just following the vanguard when I was writing, because as adventurous as I was, there were plenty of people more adventurous and more experienced. I was always trying to get in there, find the newest spots, and people say, “Oh, people are following you.” I’m, like, not really. I’m following the vanguard, people that don’t even come to Thailand anymore. The vanguard doesn’t come here anymore, forget it. They went to Vietnam for a while, but they’re not going there anymore either.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Where are they going?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
They’re going to places like Eritrea, maybe Georgia, where I just was. Places that are just opening up. Whatever’s had the fewest tourists. One of the book’s subplots is, “We need to keep this place for ourselves, this special beach, with no maps, no guides.” There are several references to, “This must not end up in Lonely Planet.” I saw it as a reaction to Lonely Planet exposing too much of the world. So, we need to keep the best places to ourselves by not letting Lonely Planet in. And it’s based on a true story. I have a fuzzy memory of being at The Sanctuary in the early 90s, and someone from the staff telling me they didn’t want to be mentioned in Lonely Planet. I was always undercover, and never told them, and I especially never told properties. I always paid and all that. I wanted to follow the scene anonymously. I remember thinking out loud, “Well it’s not for you to decide.”

 

When I read the book The Beach, I immediately thought, Garland knows this story. It was just uncanny. I wrote about it in Lonely Planet. I knew immediately that it was about The Sanctuary, even though he exaggerated, dramatized, geographically relocated it and all that.
It shows what drives people into cults, they’re confused, and they just need someone to tell them it’s gonna be all right. We’ll take care of you, the outside world is chaos. But in here in our circle, it’s all good.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Something is activated in the human psyche or nervous system. Members of the community want to get out of what’s going on in the outside world and something deeply emotional is being satisfied. There’s a desire to believe.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Those people in that movie, in the book, they were pretty educated, smart people, but they became true believers. The Agama thing is fucked up. There’s got to be, like, 31 women come forward and (allege) this guy raped me.

 

That’s why I came to Thailand in ’77, I was searching for something. I guess I was sort of headed their way, I found Hardy Stockmann here. And then I found Buddhadasa in the south. I was able to use parts of both as a balm to calm my anxiety.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
I heard that Garland wrote the book at The Sanctuary.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
I had some email correspondence with him. I was pointing out all the inaccuracies about Thai culture.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Now he’s directing movies.

 

JOE CUMMINGS
Really? Good movies?

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Yeah. 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Ex Machina.

 

When you go to Phangan now, is there any magic in it there for you still?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
I still like the place. Than Sadet, because it’s hard to get to. The Tri Bay Area (Haad Yuan, Haad Tien, Why Nam) is, I don’t know, man, but the parties just get on my nerves. At Guy’s and Eden. Let’s just have some peace and quiet, that’s what we’re here for.

 

I know a lot of people are really in love with the place still. I have friends that have lived there 10 or 12 years. But they all own businesses, they’re profiting from living there. You can still get a place in the woods, near a beach, and live a nice life there.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
In Thailand, what comes closest to those original experiences that you had on Phangan and Samui, or is that gone for good?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
I think it’s gone because you just don’t get that kind of tourism anymore. I much prefer the ones where there’s still no cars, no electricity, like Koh Payam, little Koh Chang Noi. I just came from that area, I was in the Myanmar archipelago for nine days. I saw at least 100 completely paradise beaches.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Are those going to be opened up?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
What they’re doing so far is a lot like in the Maldives. If you want to build a resort, you go through a lot of a lot of hassles to get the permission, and they only allow one resort per island. There’s eight islands there now with resorts. They’re really trying to avoid that saturation; they want to preserve the paradise perception.

 

There’s a Norwegian who has a furniture factory outside Yangon and has built a low-key resort in the archipelago. He really believes in this whole eco ethos and he wants to do it right, make it a model for the right way to do things. I stayed there for a few days, and I talked to him, and he said he goes completely by the books, doesn’t know a single person in the Tatmadaw. Also, there’s an American guy coincidentally also in the furniture business out of Singapore and Indonesia. He travelled in the archipelago and wanted to build a place and they said, yeah, you can have one island, pick an island; the island is amazing, wildlife is so intact, hundreds of hornbills flying overhead, dolphins swimming around.

 

Right here in Thailand there are still uninhabited islands you can go to and camp on, like the Surin islands. There are some archipelagos that people don’t even know about. Koh Kam, do you know that one? It’s the furthest north archipelago in Thailand’s Andaman, almost in Myanmar, it’s right next to the marine border. I’ve slept on an island there for a few days and had a marvelous time. It’s legal, you find the park headquarters and once you pay your entrance fee, like 200 baht, then you go to any island you want and camp there. Beautiful.

 

BRIAN GRUBER
Final thoughts about Koh Phangan, your experiences, things you enjoy doing, crazy memories?

 

JOE CUMMINGS
I always liked it, always had a good time, when I was looking for peace and quiet. I like city partying, when I go into nature or to the beach, I want to be quiet.

 

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