Link Banana

The Economist has a new travel blog — I’m still deeply ambivalent about the mixing of that paper and blogs — which poses an interesting question: how many travel guidebooks are written by people who’ve actually been there?

Indeed, he wrote about Colombia without even going close. As he told Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun newspaper: “They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating who was in an intern in the Colombian consulate.”

Lonely Planet protests that Mr Kohnstamm is an isolated example. “We don’t have any evidence as yet that what he describes in that book applies anywhere else,” said Stephen Palmer, Lonely Planet’s chief executive, to the BBC. And the company has also deflated Mr Kohnstamm’s remarks about Colombia by pointing out that he was writing about the country’s history, not its sights or restaurants.