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Story of Lonely Planet's beginnings

Tue Jun 5, 9:50 AM ET

NEW YORK - They drove from Europe to

Afghanistan in a car that cost $150, spent their first anniversary at the Taj Mahal, and hitched a ride on a yacht from Asia to Australia.

Everyone they spoke to wanted to know where they'd gone and how they did it. And so Maureen and Tony Wheeler wrote their first guidebook more than 30 years ago, and the Lonely Planet series was born. Now they've written "Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story" (Tuttle Publishing, $16.95), describing the evolution of their company.

One of the most interesting anecdotes concerns the creation of the name "Lonely Planet." They'd just seen a rock'n'roll movie, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," and Tony Wheeler kept singing the words to a Joe Cocker song in the film - "Once I was traveling across the sky, this lovely planet caught my eye." But he'd gotten the words wrong, thinking the phrase was "lonely planet," and the error stuck.

The Wheelers gave a talk about the book, the company and their travels together June 4 at a Borders book store in Manhattan, where the audience asked for advice on everything from getting into

North Korea to traveling around Malaysia. One fan noted that "Unlikely Destinations" is a good business book in addition to being an interesting travel memoir, to which Tony Wheeler responded: "The thing about business is, do what you really believe in. We didn't start Lonely Planet because we wanted to sell lots of guidebooks. We did it because we wanted to travel."

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