Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet talks IP
Yeah, Lonely Planet. I'm going to go back to the early days but first of all there's three brands that use up my life these days, one of course is Lonely Planet. A logo which I've actually designed myself. We've had various people who've looked at it subsequently and tried making the L a little bit narrower or the A a bit wider or something but basically it hasn't changed at all. That was done with some letterset on the kitchen table all those years ago and now might be worth a lot of money but didn't take very much money to create.
The second one, Planet Wheeler. We fairly early on in the Lonely Planet days set up a Lonely Planet Foundation. We thought, look we're making money in the developing world and particularly in Africa we thought at that time. It was when the Live Aids and the Ethiopian famine was going on and we thought we should be putting some of that money back into the countries that we profited from and we set up a Foundation and now that I'm no longer part of Lonely Planet anymore that Foundation has become the Planet Wheeler Foundation. And we've actually got seventy projects going on, mainly in the developing world, principally in education and health and in Africa and South East Asia, in Central Asia. My daughter helps to run it, we've got two other people running it and they're constantly running around looking at the projects we're doing and I'm very proud of that.
And the other thing is the Wheeler Centre, which opened last year in Melbourne. The Wheeler Centre of books, writing and ideas. It's located in part of the old Melbourne Library building, State Library building with lots of interesting writers. The Deakin Lectures last year with Tim Flannery running them - that was under the Wheeler Centre umbrella. So, three things that I have an involvement with and I'm very proud of.
But if I ever think about the value of IP I think of this gentleman. Brian Eno, there he was in his Roxy Music days, Brian Eno and Brian Ferry who started Roxy Music and today he's known as Britain's favourite intellectual. And about ten, fifteen years ago he wrote a book called A Year with Swollen Appendices. The appendices were the things at the end of a book. There were various additional chapters to it, which he added after his diary. And it was a diary of his year and it actually inspired me to start keeping a diary after that because it was so interesting and he really ended up spending his time in the year dividing it up into four areas, or dividing the things he did into four. One was the things he did for free. That he'd open a gallery, that he'd speak at some convention, he'd judge some competition and as Britain's favourite intellectual he did these things and didn’t make any money out of them at all. Then there were the things he did that he enjoyed doing and in some ways he said, were a total waste of time. And his diary quite often had 'I got up this morning intending to do this and I spent the whole twenty four hours of that day messing around with Photoshop' which I’m sure quite a few of you will agree how addictive things like that can be. Then there were things that he did that were real work and he made money out of like he's been the producer for seven of U2's albums including Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby and he was working on a U2 album that year and was zipping off to Dublin or LA or whatever, to work on these albums, and getting paid for it of course and, you know, it was a very interesting part of his diary. But the thing he really made the money out of that year was he composed some music. He composed the music for Microsoft that was the opening tune to Windows 95. And he said when he was asked to do this, they gave him a list of about a hundred and fifty adjectives, like inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional – things this music had to conjure up. And he spent a lot of time on it. He eventually composed eighty-four different pieces and he wasn't really paid very much. He was only paid sort of a millionth of a cent but he was paid that every time somebody turned on Windows 95. And as a result this made far more money than anything else he did that year. He said the final thing on this list that this very financially rewarding composition had to do and had to be was, it had to be no more than three point eight seconds long. So a large part of his year was creating this piece of intellectual property that lasted for three point eight seconds.
Anyway, I'm going to take you back to Lonely Planet. How we came to create a financially rewarding business. And I'm afraid I'm going to take you back to fashions we would rather forget about. When did I get married? It's my forty third, my fortieth anniversary this year, so 1971 in Hampstead Registry Office, that's what you wore in the last sixties, early seventies. Maureen and I had actually known each other for three hundred and sixty five days; we'd met precisely prior to that on a park bench in London. I was actually doing an MBA at that time at London Business School and a year later I graduated. It looks like I'm sixteen and she's twelve (laughs) actually she was twenty-one and I was twenty-four or something. The day after that we set off to get travel out of our systems. We thought we'll take a one year trip around the world and then we'll settle down to you know, to real life and we decided we’d do that by getting this old car and driving it as far east as it would go. We paid about a hundred and fifty dollars for that mini-van and this is July 1972. It's before global warming because it's an unseasonal snowstorm in the Swiss Alps. We drove across Europe. There's the kitchen area, Maureen producing dinner that night in the kitchen area of that car. And it was an English car so of course it overheated. That was in Greece. We drove all the way across Europe, we got to Istanbul. That's looking down on the Bosphorus, and The Golden Horn and at that time there were no bridges or tunnels under the Bosphorus, you had to actually get on a ferry, so there was this real feeling when you left European Istanbul and crossed over to Asian Istanbul of going from one continent to another. You really felt there was that change going on.
So we crossed over the Bosphorus and we got into Eastern Turkey and this car we'd bought, it was so cheap, our view was if it breaks down we'll just leave it by the roadside, we'll just leave it there. But it kept going and we drove all the way across Turkey. You can see Mount Ararat in the background. This is the mountain where Noah is said to have landed his Ark at the end of the forty days and forty nights of rain. We crossed by Mount Ararat and we got right to the end of Turkey and we crossed into Iran. That's down in the south of Iran, Isfahan, one of the beautiful bridges in that very beautiful city. Of course today Maureen would have to be wearing something rather more all enveloping and covering in Iran today but I have been back to Iran a number of times and it is still a delightful country to travel around. One of many, very friendly, outgoing people, very interested in you. A lot of Iranians speak English and they're always interested to hear what your view of their troubled country is.
We travelled around Iran for a while and we kept on going further east and we got to Afghanistan, here we are approaching the border of Afghanistan and we drove into Afghanistan to Herat and down to Kandahar and up to Kabul. Kabul, we managed to sell our car for a five dollar profit (laughs) so far from having to leave it by the roadside and walk away from it we’d driven it all the way to Afghanistan and we’d turned a profit at the end of it. So we took a bus over the Khyber Pass down to Pakistan and we got to the border with India. There’s our car in the Customs compound in um, I say today that was probably Osama Bin Laden’s get away vehicle. I hear it’s parked behind a place in Abramabad at the moment, they’re looking over it for clues but we left it there and we took a bus over the Khyber Pass, down to Pakistan and travelled across Pakistan and got down to the border with India and at that time things weren’t going on too well between the Pakistanis and Indians, some things don’t change.
The border was only open for three hours a week and you had to get there on Thursday night and be there when it opened on Friday morning. Maureen in the middle there, an Irish guy who was a journalist, a guy from Taralgon who was a train driver, a Vietnam vet, travelling around the world to get Vietnam out of his mind and a British woman who later on wrote a book called A Woman’s Guide to Adultery which was turned into a television series in Britain. Anyway, we were all young and penniless at that time and we crossed into India and we travelled around India a bit and Maureen and I managed to end up at the Taj Mahal on our first wedding anniversary so, timing, planning. And from there we headed north and we got into Katmandu and I spun the prayer wheels around one of the Tibetan stupas in Katmandu and there were some very interesting shops in Katmandu at that time (laughter). Of course we never inhaled. And really these places were really fronts for changing money. It was quite legal at that time to buy hashish from the Central Hashish Store but it was illegal to change money on the black market so you went in there, not to get a few hundred grams of something but to change dollars or pounds into something more useful locally.
We spent our time there and then back down to India and across to Calcutta and took what turned out to be the only flight of the trip, across to Bangkok. By the time we got there we'd be travelling for nearly six months and money was beginning to run low and we started hitch-hiking, Maureen by the side of the road, hitch hiking through Thailand and down through Malaysia and Singapore and of course at this time Lee Kwan Yew, Lee Kwan Yew is still in power in Singapore isn't he, he still runs the place but at that time he definitely was in power and Mr Lee was convinced that these long haired hippies he'd heard of were going to subvert the hard working youth of Singapore. At Singapore at that time you'd find these signs saying Male with Long Hair will be Attended to Last (laughter) and you got into a Post Office or a Bank or something or a Government Office with hair like that you had to go to the back of the line and wait for everyone else to be looked after (laughter). That'll teach them. So when we got to the Malaysian border the Malaysians took one look at us and my long hair and they stamped in my passport S.H.I.T. for suspected hippie in transit (laughter). We transited down to Singapore and I got a haircut there. Spent a few days there then took a boat across to Djakarta and travelled down through Indonesia, down to Bali. And of course all this was very different from the way it is today. Thailand was still a place winding down from; the Vietnam War was not quite finished really. The North Vietnamese hadn't taken over South Vietnam yet so tourism in Bangkok was still R&R and Singapore was not yet just an air-conditioned shopping centre and not much else. So things have changed a lot since then and we got down to Kuta Beach in Bali where there were a handful of little Losman and a handful of restaurants and we were wondering how we were going to get down to Australia. The plan was to get down to Timor, we were concerned how we were gonna do that but then we heard a New Zealander say 'I only need two more crew and I'm sailing my yacht down to Australia' and he had his two crew instantly. So we joined the yacht Sun Peddler out of Auckland, New Zealand. There's Maureen, up on the side there, and we set off to sail down to Australia.
There were seven of us on this boat. Two Australians who were very keen to get back to Australia because it was time. It was time to elect Gough Whitlam. But we got about three days out of Bali and we got totally becalmed and we got nowhere at all. That's most of the crew. That’s five of us out of seven swimming along behind the boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean because there was just no wind and we were going nowhere. Actually Maureen was on board the boat not swimming anywhere, not eating any food, not doing much else because Maureen was completely sea sick for a week and lay there feeling absolutely miserable and by this time we’d been becalmed for so long, we'd eaten most of the food and things weren't going so well on the happy ship, Sun Peddler. We were reduced to eating tins of food that had been in the bilge since they’d left New Zealand three years previously and the labels had been washed off you weren’t sure what it would turn out to be. It was going to be either creamed sweet corn, asparagus spears or Christmas pudding it generally seemed (laughter).
But eventually after sixteen days instead of six or eight we did arrive in Australia. We stepped ashore, at that point Maureen and I had been in Australia about two minutes, and Gough Whitlam had been in power about six days, so we'd missed the election and I've always said that if we'd arrived here during the John Howard era we would have been sent straight to Nauru (laughter) and Lonely Planet today would be a Nauren company, not an Australian one. But that was back then and things were much easier. So we stepped ashore as boat people and we than started hitch hiking and we hitch hiked down to Perth, and that took a couple of days and we met a guy who was driving back to Newcastle for Christmas so we shared the driving and the petrol with him. There we are in the middle of the Nullabor desert with another hitchhiker we'd picked up and Maureen in the middle and the guy from the air force on the other side and his Holden of the era. And we got to Sydney. He dropped us off and Maureen and I hitch hiked into Sydney and we crossed the bridge into Sydney and got dropped off in Martin Place and Maureen said to me 'how much money have we got left' and I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out twenty seven cents. Fortunately I had a camera as well and I took the camera up to the Cross and got twenty-four dollars for it from a loan shop up in the Cross. Within a few days we had jobs and bought a car a week or two later and before we knew it everything was going fine. Everything was going fine except for one thing that had gone really, really wrong. And that was we had just had such a good time there was no way in the world we wanted to travel around the world for a year and get travel out of our system. So we said, OK this is not a one year trip around the world it's a three year trip around the world and we'll spend a year in Sydney and earn enough money to travel for another year.
And then in that year, so many people asked us, 'where did you go, how did you do it, what did it cost?' that we wrote a book about it. But first of all there we are on our second wedding anniversary in front of the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Opera House still under construction in 1973. And very soon after that our first book came out and that was Across Asia on the Cheap and we did it in our basement flat in Paddington in Sydney and we both had full time jobs so it was an evening and weekends job. We put it out and to our absolute amazement it sold out and we had to print some more so we thought OK, we will leave Paddington, there’s our car which I paid three hundred dollars for and sold for six hundred (laughter) I was a engineer in a previous lifetime. Our flat, you can't really see Maureen standing there but our flat, the first office, was the basement of that house.
This time we bought a motorcycle and we set off. We rode up to Darwin, there we are in the Northern Territory and we went down to Ayers Rock before they paved the road down there, it was still very muddy if it rained and of course you could climb Ayers Rock without being politically incorrect in those days, or climb Uluru as you say today. And it broke down from time to time as motorcycles and things tend to do. There we are by the side of the road with I’m glad to see, a Volkswagen Kombi going by to show the era. And we got up to Darwin and we loaded onto a TAA Fokker Friendship and flew it across to Timor and travelled along the north coast of Timor, Portuguese Timor as it was. I’ve been back to Indonesian Timor and East Timor in the subsequent years. And in all those hundreds of years the Portuguese were there they'd never managed to build a bridge across a river, so every time you came to a river you had to wade across and find where it was shallow enough to get your motorcycle over. We travelled along the north coast and we got to Dilli and everybody who is anybody backpackers there and you stayed in this place called the Hippy Hilton. There's a bit of intellectual property theft. Cost you seventy-five cents to unroll your sleeping bag on the floor and we stayed there for a few days and then carried on, on the very well sealed main road (laughter) to the Indonesian side of the island. Then we started shipping the motorcycle from island to island, heading north. A lot of the places there was no dock, so we had to lower it out of the ship onto a smaller boat like this one to get it ashore and unload it on the beach. That is the island of Flores off East Timor. And we spent a year travelling around South East Asia, met lots of other people. This is a Belgian cyclist we met on a back road of Java who;d ridden all the way from Europe on his bicycle. Had great times, stayed in places like this hotel in Penang in Malaysia. Met lots of interesting animals as well as people. Maureen's got some bananas in her bag, that's why that small elephant is showing a real interest in her in Thailand. At the end of the year, at the end of 1974, having spent that whole year in South East Asia we sat down in a little hotel, the Palace Hotel in Singapore, and we stayed in that hotel room, about two dollars a night for three months. And in that three months we put the second book together on that little table. It was all designed on that table and written up on that table. This is before computers of course so you had to glue things down on pages, you cut out the typeset words and glued them down on the mats and we did that whole book on that table. The books gone through about thirteen editions now, it’s sold well over a million copies and the first edition had a yellow cover and people started calling it The Yellow Bible and as a result it's had to have a yellow cover ever since. That was the real like, in many ways, start of Lonely Planet.
So we thought what do we do now, where do we go and we thought well, we started the business in Australia so let's go back to Australia. So even though we hadn't intended to we did end up back in Australia and then we started travelling to other places and doing other books. We went back to Nepal and met a Nepalese writer and did a guide book to Nepal. There's Mount Everest just looking over the top there, over Maureen's head, walking up to the Everest base camp. We went to New Guinea and did a guide book to New Guinea before anyone else had really thought of that. That's Maureen up in the highlands of New Guinea. We went to Burma and did a Burma guide before that became politically incorrect. We had a lot of fun in the seventies doing these books. It was a very small company, we really did everything ourselves. At that stage Maureen and I were writing most of the books and designing them ourselves and taking most of the photographs. In fact when we did a Sri Lanka guide, Maureen even had to walk down the beach and pose for the front cover of that book.
So it was a small business but in 1980 we went off to India with two other writers and between these three teams we spent a total of a year of travel in India. And the one book really revolutionised us because it was it was three times bigger than anything we'd ever done before, it sold for three times as much and it just doubled the size of the company in one jump. It was a fantastic book. I’m still very proud of that book today. That was the Lonely Planet office at that time and that was our entire staff at that time. There were about a year or two later when we'd grown quite rapidly and had more staff and were doing a lot more books quite quickly. We’d actually got our first computer around that stage as well, which actually was quite revolutionary. You didn't go into many, you didn’t go into any publishing houses in fact, and find people doing things on computers. Computers revolutionised, they were amazingly expensive, you look at what those things cost in those days and it’s just ridiculous to what they cost today. And of course no memory or anything else at all. But the India guide won the Guide Book of the Year in Britain, that's at the Royal Geographical Society and that’s Lord Hunt who led the first successful expedition to climb Mount Everest. It was a great book. We're still very, very proud of that book and it made a big difference to us.
But what it also made very clear to us was the importance of controlling the intellectual property rights in our books and it was something we started doing very seriously from that point. One of the other writers involved in writing that book was this guy Geoff Crowther, who came to us with this book on Africa which is still the only guidebook anybody does on all of Africa. But Geoff brought that book to us and we paid - the traditional way of paying a writer of a book is that you pay them a royalty. They create the book and you pay them a percentage of the sales as a royalty on the book and that's what we did with Geoff on the African guide. And that's what we did with the India guide.
We basically had no money and Maureen and I gave Geoff a thousand dollars to spend six months in India and the other writer, who's a Nepalese guy who did our first Nepal guide, we have him a thousand dollars each and we also paid them each two and a half percent royalty. So on that first book, the 1987 edition, a couple of years later, which was selling for twenty four ninety five, sold a hundred thousand copies, five percent royalty, that meant we paid out a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in royalties. And we began to realise, well, we realised very quickly that this was just not sustainable, we wanted to own the copyright ourselves. So we started buying out authors who did have copyright in the books and writing contracts with all the books from there on that we had the copyright. And as a result, by this point, Geoff who was making a huge amount of money and we had to pay Geoff a huge amount of money to buy out all his copyrights, but he was actually earning more money than he deserved because he didn't have the time to cover all the books that he was originally the creator of as the books got larger and larger. So we started owning ourselves and the China book, from the moment we created that book, we owned the copyright.
The ownership of that book belonged to Lonely Planet. And this was the thing that did make Lonely Planet a different sort of company. The fact that all the property in our books belonged to the business. The one that I always think about as being quite funny on this was Tibet because one of the two writers who worked on that very first China guide, that one we saw, that was the third edition of China. But the first edition of China, we had two writers involved on it and it was our book but nevertheless one of the writers phoned us up about a year later and said 'I am about to get into Tibet'. Nobody had got into Tibet at that time. He said 'I've found the doorway to get into Tibet, I'm going to go there with a friend of mine, we're going to go all around Tibet, we'll write you a guide book to Tibet, it will be the first guide book anybody's ever seen to Tibet' and it was and it sold very well. But because he'd created it himself he talked us into giving him the copyright which worked fine on the first edition but when the second edition came along, the two writers fell out with each other. They would not work on it together, they had huge arguments over who had written what part of it and we then ended up, we were the piggy in the middle who had to settle between these two authors. The only way to do it was to get rid of one of them and the other one had to re-write the entire half of the book that the other one had done. Which we did for the second edition so the second edition wasn't really the improved book that it should have been because we had to start, more or less, from scratch.
Well what happens with the third edition is the writer who's now done it, he then gets ill and can't go to Tibet but nor will he let us put another writer in. So we ended up having to get rid of him, start the whole book from scratch all over again. So our third edition of Tibet was still like a first edition because it had been re-written three times. This just drove us crazy and we said never again would we let a writer get control of it like that so the fourth edition really was the definitive edition. It was updated, it was improved, we had writers who we knew were really going to do a good job on it, including me.
I took that cover photograph and I went up to Tibet and I had a great time. We walked up to Nepal and there's the trail across the Himalayas up towards the Tibetan border. It's a one-week walk the way we took up to get there. Along the way, further down south in the plains of Nepal we passed through some very interesting fields (laughter) I mean look at that crop, what would that be worth in Byron Bay today (laughter). I stayed in some wonderful hotels in Tibet, some of the best hotels Tibet could find. I came away convinced that if you want to have bad hotels and terrible toilets, the Tibetans have a lock on it. But it was a lot of fun and one of the high points of doing that book was we got out right into the west of Tibet and we turned around there, we got a truck to pick us up, and we started driving back, there I am, me and there's the truck behind that was taking us back to Lhasa. You know you are a long way from anywhere.
And halfway across Tibet, in the absolute middle of nowhere, we’ll go back to it, we met this guy, John Bezrichka, who was one of the other writers on the book. And John said ‘well here I was working on the book and I heard you guys were somewhere in Tibet and I thought if you were heading from western Tibet towards Lhasa you’d have to come down this road, so I thought I’d sit down by the roadside and see if you come by. (laughter) 'And I decided I wasn’t going to wait for more than a week and I’ve only been here for three days. Sure enough you did come by and I’ll hitch a ride with you the rest of the way'. And I thought that's the sort of writer you need. The sort of writer who'll think 'I’m in the middle of Tibet, you might pass by in the next week, I'll just sit down by the Hume Highway and see if you come by'. Great. Terrific.
But really, you know, controlling the intellectual rights of your books and so forth is very important and a lot of it also the way we reuse things. So we send someone in to research Paris, actually Paris, we’ll research it backwards and forwards. We'll do a city guide, we’ll do a shorter more photographic guide, we’ll also turn it into an iphone app. So that's information we've researched that gets reused in multiple different ways and the fact that we own that information makes it much easier, much more productive to do that. Thirty percent of our sales of a book as the Paris guide now will be as the iphone app rather than as the print guide.
Then of course the Paris guide becomes a chapter of the France book and the Discover France book so its reused again, repackaged, different restaurants, different hotels might be put in but essentially it's that same information, that same stuff that you've done ends up in different products. And then it gets reused into your Mediterranean Europe guide because France is part of Mediterranean Europe, into your Western Europe guide because France is part of Western Europe and in a shortened version in your Europe on a Shoestring guide because France is part of Europe. Paris information that you’ve researched, because you own it, you can reuse it over and over again. And then of course it goes into your foreign language guidebooks including of course, your Chinese guidebook. We're actually the number two publisher of guidebooks in China now with our Chinese part of that. That's the Chinese guidebook to Australia. Find your way around Canberra, find your way to the hotels and restaurants of Canberra, there’s the book, if you’re Chinese, there’s the book you use.
We're the number one publisher of guide books in the Italian language, we're number three or four in German, we're number one in lots of places and our books go into all sorts of different languages. And it's that same information being used and reused because we control the rights to it. Probably the rights doesn't always do you that much good because sometimes your intellectual property gets stolen and book wise, the place to have it stolen is Vietnam. Boy, they drive us crazy in Vietnam. We've bribed all the right people and we’ve got the Australian government to help us there, nevertheless, they steal it over and over again. It was quite amusing at the very start because our very first Vietnam guide, we went in there at a time when it was very difficult to travel around Vietnam and you needed all sorts of permits to go places and the people who’d issued you the permit in one place, wouldn’t um, the next place you went to didn’t necessarily know who’d issued the last permit and would turn you back or whatever. And our writer ended up getting deported from Vietnam in the end because he’d gone one too many places he shouldn’t have gone to. But nevertheless we put the book out and as soon as it was out, the Vietnamese pirated it. And our second edition of Vietnam, we said something about Vietnam had the best police money could buy (laughs) which was a little bit of a double entendre and the Vietnamese government took exception to this and first of all banned our book and then reprinted it themselves (laughter). You know, it really wasn’t very nice. But we’ve had trouble with Vietnam right along the way and it’s one think pirating the damned thing if you’re selling it there, but when they pirate it and start exporting to other countries, well that really, really annoys you. So of the places where it’s a problem for us, piracy, Vietnam as far as books go, is the number one place.
Other places, you know the fact that it gets pirated really amuses me. It amuses me that our Iran guide gets pirated in Iran and part of that of course is that you just can’t get anything into Iran at all so we just can’t sell the book there. And remarkably a lot of Iranians use our book to travel around Iran. I just think that’s wonderful. The fact that an Australian guidebook gets used to discover the best places, the best restaurants, the best hotels and so forth in Iran is terrific. It’s annoying but we don’t lose a huge amount of money on that whereas in Vietnam we do. And not only do they pirate the Vietnam book, they sell our Australia guide, you going to Australia next, well buy our Australia guide before you fly down there. Makes me angry.
But I'm going to leave intellectual property and I'm going to go back to travel a bit because at one point Maureen and I had kids and of course our kids got dragged along on our travels. There's my son and my daughter in a bus station in Kenya when they were still very young and of course they got dragged into producing the book as well. We did a travel with children book; they had to pose for the front cover. That was taken in Africa as well. We've done lots of interesting trips over the years. In nineteen ninety-four, we bought this old Cadillac, we bought it in San Francisco and we took two trips across America. We went east and west/east and then east/west. It was a car that um, it got nine and a half miles per gallon over the, it was twenty five years, thirty five years old even then, it would be fifty years old today. It really had no brakes to speak of; you slowed down more by saying slow to it than by putting your foot on the brake pedal. It had a boot so big you could climb into it and walk to the front of it to rearrange the bags (laughter) But it had a cigarette lighter for every seat (laughter). They knew how to build cars in Detroit in 1959. Six cigarette lighters so anyway, and I don't smoke. We followed Route 66 for a while but we had this little laptop computer on board, which Hewlett Packard had given us and we sent back a blog every night to O'Reilly, the guy who coined the phrase Web two point zero and who had one of the very first websites, commercial websites going at that time. And we had a daily blog up on it about our travels in this old Cadillac. You can look up the history of the Web and that was one of the first uses of the Web Tim O'Reilly's global network navigator.
Um, so that was a very interesting thing to do. Around that same time, nineteen ninety-seven we published a guide to Antarctica. There's Maureen in the middle there, we went down to Antarctica after our Antarctica guide. One of the things, the pleasures of owning a travel guide company is you get to try your products out. Not only are we the only company that more or less covers everywhere in the world we even have the book on sale at one Antarctic station where tourists ships often stop in. You can buy our Antarctica guide in Antarctica. So we're on sale in all seven continents as well.
We have other parts of Lonely Planet these days as well. Lonely Planet images which has a digital library in which we sell to everything from airlines to magazines to advertising agencies and so on, over a third of a million digital images on board. We’ve got LPTV that produces television programs. We did Going Bush with Cathy Freeman, she was terrific to deal with, she was a real star performer. So with that producing TV series, we did Air Show for Qantas, and the A380 an interactional guidebook that you can use from your seat on the aircraft and is being rolled out in other A380’s as well. We worked with Airbus on that. Um, I get to have fun writing books still. I say George Bush made me write this book because as soon as he said there was an Axis of Evil, my first thought was, well I want to go there (laughter) I mean what a challenge, obviously you want to see those places, so I did. I went to North Korea, quite the weirdest country I have ever been to. I had a wonderful time traveling around North Korea, I thought it was like a movie set. Everywhere you went you thought if you walked around behind the building you'd find it was totally fake and just propped up. I went back to Iran. As an engineer actually I'd worked for the Roots Car Company in Britain years ago, on the Hillman Hunter which of course they sold the whole factory to the Iranians and they turned them out for the next forty years as Pecans, Arrows. I wanted to get a picture of one of those with the Ayatollah in the background and I took that photograph on that trip. I went to Iraq, there I am being welcomed, I hadn't actually told Maureen I was going to Iraq. I was on my way from a conference in Singapore to another tourism conference in Washington DC and I thought well, I'll stop off in Iraq for a couple of days on the way. So I took a flight out to the east of Turkey, just came out of the airport and said to the taxi, a bit like arriving in Canberra and said 'take me to Iraq' and they said 'sure'. And drove me to the border and dropped me off at the border and I walked across it into the Kurdistan region, the safe region of Iraq and sent Maureen back a photograph saying 'oh by the way I stopped off somewhere on my way to DC'. So that was great fun.
I went of course to Libya. Badlands with Mr Kaddafi. I said afterwards that I thought Mr Kaddafi was the Michael Jackson of Dictators (laughter) He just loved to dress up in all these outfits. Either he was in his military outfit or his naval outfit from the HMAS Pinafore school of naval uniforms. He just loved dressing up and this is the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Arab chic outfit. He is definitely a strange guy who deserves to be overthrown when he is.
But yeah, I get to do lots of interesting things. But three years ago Maureen and I sold seventy percent of Lonely Planet and sold the remainder just a few months ago to BBC Worldwide and I’m not allowed to say what it was sold for but it's always nice the kind of figures the media came up with. A hundred and forty three million euro, a hundred million, two hundred million dollars according to The Age. Nice figures, they’d be nice to put in your pocket. So we do other things today like Planet Wheeler and the Wheeler Centre. That's Maureen and I when we were trekking in Nepal a few years ago going by a boarding school we financed building in the Himalaya for kids that didn’t have a school they could get to normally. We get to do fun things like going to, there’s now a series of Lonely Planet magazines launched since BBC came in and Maureen and I got to go to India to help launch the Indian edition of it last year. A truly Bollywood launch, there's three Bollywood stars there, the magazine publisher at one side, the Bollywood stars and Maureen and I at the other, that was a lot of fun doing that.
So we get to do lots of fun things. A couple of years ago we did this flight. We joined up with other people who'd chartered this fifty-year-old South African Convair and we flew up the west coast of Africa for a month, stopping at places like Angola, and Kuban and Central African Republic, it was a fantastic trip. And one of the places we stopped off, we went to this gorilla orphanage and there's Maureen holding a baby, she said it was just like holding a baby, a baby gorilla that had been orphaned. That was a fantastic trip. Got to go to places like Timbuktu and anybody who's a real traveler wants to go to Timbuktu, you want to have that on your travel list that you’ve actually been to the airport of Timbuktu. Two years ago Maureen and I did the Plymouth Banjul Challenge. This is a sort of piss take on the Paris Dacca Rally because the idea is you have to buy an old car, not a, you know not a multi million dollar car. The cheaper the car the better. So this is crossing the Sahara Desert in Mauritania. Maureen flew into London on the Sunday. On Monday we paid three hundred and fifty pounds for that nineteen ninety eight Mitsubishi and on the Thursday we set off with about forty other people doing this, to drive down to Gambia, to Banjul in Gambia. We shared a guide as we crossed this stretch of the Sahara Desert with these three other competitors, people we can call competitors. That’s the route you take. You start in England, through France, through Spain, cross to Morocco, down through Morocco, through the Western Sahara, into Mauritania. The Sahara actually runs down to the sea so you drive along the beach here through Mauritania, Senegal, by Dacca and then down all the way into Banjul in Gambia. And if you get to the finish line, that's leaving the desert putting air back into the tyres, if you get to the finish line, crossing the river into Banjul in Gambia, there’s our three hundred pound car. If you get there all the cars are sold and the money goes to African charities. You have to give your car away. So we got there, we gave away our car, this gentleman in the green outfit; he paid the equivalent of seven hundred pounds for it. So this car doubled it's value from London – we had no trouble with it at all. We had one puncture in Morocco and apart from that it got us all the way there, cost us three hundred pounds and we had a lot of fun.
So you know you can have cheap fun doing adventurous things. But the thing that's been the most fun, travel wise in the last couple of years was going down to Kazakhstan to see a Soyuz space launch in 2008. And one of the nice things about this is there were some Americans there from NASA and they said if this was NASA at Cape Canaveral you would be four kilometers away in a concrete bunker whereas as you can see, the Russians let you stand really close (laughter). I mean you felt the heat, the dust washed over you but the reason I'd gone down there, I went down, Larry Page was there Sergey Brinn from Microsoft, Charles Simony in the middle there and some other interesting people. Charles Simony was the guy who more or less wrote Word and Excel with Microsoft in the early days. But the guy set up a company called Space Adventures. He went to the Americans, to NASA and he said 'what would it cost to go up in a space shuttle?' And they were told 'piss off, we don't take rich people up in the space shuttle' because he had a rich computer entrepreneur who wanted to go up. And so they went to the Russians instead. And they said to the Russians how much would it cost to go up on Soyuz and the Russians said ‘well nobody’s asked us that before, we don’t send up fare paying passengers, but we’ll think about it'. ‘It will cost you one hundred thousand dollars for us to think about it but write us a cheque, come back in six months time and we’ll say yes or no’. So they wrote them a cheque for one hundred thousand and they came back in six months and the Russians said ‘yeah, we’ll do it, first of all you've got to learn to speak Russian you know, so you can understand the orders on the space launch, space thing, then you've got to spend six months at the Cosmonaught centre, learning to be a Cosmonaught and thirdly, there is a price tag, twenty million dollars'. And they said OK. (laughter) And each one of the eight people have now paid to go up including Charles Simony who has been up twice. He got no frequent flyer miles; he had to pay the full twenty million dollars for his second trip up there. Anyway, we went there to see the launch and it was just, partly it was spending a few days with Sergey Brinn and Larry Page.
Sergey Brinn has actually put up ten million dollars to put his name on the passenger list, the wait list. It was great, it was a really intriguing thing to do. Here we are, there is the three. There is the Russian Cosmo naught mission leader, we got to stand that close to them when they were going out. Here's the NASA astronaut, NASA were paying for him to go up to the space station and here is the guy paying twenty million dollars. His father was a NASA astronaught but he'd invented something, a computer game, that if you were eighteen years old you'd know it. And he'd paid the twenty million to go up and spend two weeks on the international space station. Great time, I met a number of astronauts. Actually this guy here is Australian and he's the back up, because every time there's a back up. If he trips over getting on the bus and breaks his ankle, he will quickly put his space suit on and join the trip. Anyway that was that. That was a fantastic thing.
Um, last year I did a stage of the Tour d'Afrique, a four-month bicycle ride that starts in Cairo and ends up four months later in Cape Town. And we put in two teams from Lonely Planet as a sort of relay team. That's in Ethiopia, that's an Ethiopian guy who joined us for that spell. This guy is our number one writer, David Ellis from England, he's an Australian from our Melbourne office and they were riding that stage. An American author who was riding the stage through Botswana with an elephant in the background. And I rode two weeks through Tanzania and Malawi, that's me going through Malawi. Again, great fun to do. And I rode around Lake Burley Griffin yesterday and today, just to keep in shape.
So yes, it's been a lot of fun but if I look at one thing in Lonely Planet that I’m really proud about, here it is right here. Aidan Hartley wrote a book called the Zanzibar Chest about his time as a Reuter's correspondent in Africa over the years and a lot of the adventures he'd had in Africa. And one of them was when Mengistou who was the dictator in Ethiopia and was supported by the Soviets and as the Soviet empire was collapsing they weren't supporting him anymore and the rebels were closing in on Addis Ababa and this was the revolution that created Eritrea as well. And Aiden Hartley was with the rebels when they closed in on Addis Ababa and more or less a day or so before they rolled in, they had captured tanks, they had captured these Russian tanks from the Ethiopian army. And as they were closing in on Addis Ababa the head of the rebels, the Rebel Commander came to Aidan and said to him 'most of us have been exiled from Addis Ababa for the last two decades or we've never been there in our lives, the younger soldiers, we've got no idea what the city's like. Do you by any chance have a map?' And Aidan said the only thing I had was my copy of Lonely Planet's Africa on a Shoestring but they thought this was great and they photocopied our map of Addis Ababa, distributed it to all the tank commanders and as the tanks rolled into the town to overthrow the government, they were led there by our guide book. (laughter) I thought, terrific. When I can overthrow a government, that's wonderful. I'd like to do that more often you know. There's a few governments I'd like to overthrow.
So yeah, we helped to overthrow the Ethiopian government, that was back in ninety-one. Of course, Mengistou, he fled the country and where did he end up? He ended up in Zimbabwe where to this day Mugabe is looking after him. So when I was in Zimbabwe two weeks ago, I went looking for him. I had his address and unfortunately I couldn’t get into the street where he lives because he has little military guard who keeps everybody out but there’s a lot of security around there. People have signs up saying beware of my guard dogs and beware of my snakes this one said, it was nice. And there’s the Gunhill Neighborhood Watch. Gunhill is the name of the particular suburb and I rather like to think that Mengistou is part of Gunhill Neighbourhood Watch.
So look that's been the Lonely Planet story and here we are, here’s our name being stolen again by Bintang Beer in Indonesia. This was an occasion where I was quite happy for them to do a bit of intellectual property right theft. They'd stolen our name, they'd used it on a beer billboard and I was quite happy to stand below it with Maureen and point it out.
It's been a fun ride all the way.
(Ends)
Last Updated: 12/12/2012
