Book Review - To Asia With Love

 
International Herald Tribune/ThaiDay
Tuesday, December 13, 2005.
 
Book Review: Off the trails
An unorthodox guidebook with little hard info but plenty of local wisdom
 
Reviewed by Greg Lowe
 
Breathing life into the tired genre of travel guide is no small feat. After all, just how many ways are there to present information on where to go, where to stay and what to do in any given country?
 
Sure, the depth, complexity and quality of information - as well as the design and navigability of the book in hand - all serve to create the specific look and feel that sets one guide apart from another. Some publications tailor their content to specific age groups, price ranges or countries of origin. Others try to have something for everyone.
 
Then there are books like To Asia With Love: A Connoisseur's Guide to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand & Vietnam. Its aim is to revamp the entire concept of a guidebook by drawing on contributions from 51 writers who reside in the countries it covers. The diverse range of voices vary from photographers and magazine editors to authors, NGO workers, expats and locals.
 
Edited by Kim Fay (with photos by her sister Julie Fay), the book is a spin-off of their highly successful thingsasian.com website, one of the original online communities of travel writers and photographers to focus on Southeast Asia.
 
Essentially a compilation of recommendations, observations and anecdotes, the book seeks to give travelers better insight by helping them develop a feel for each destination.
 
This stands out against the more typical laundry lists of guesthouses, bars, temples and transport usually found in guides.
 
To Asia With Love breaks format again by running its sections according to theme, rather than country. The book is broken down into 10 main chapters: Moveable Feasts; Acquiring Minds Want to Know; Seeing the Sights; Secret Gardens; Short, But Oh So Sweet; Into the Wild; When in Rome; Paying it Forward; Booking Your Trip; and Reading For The Road.
 
Each chapter presents a number of short to medium length accounts from contributors that provide local knowledge combined with an experiential perspective on the peculiarities of things like ordering food in Laos, shopping in Vietnam, or getting your hair washed in Thailand.
 
Some of these anecdotes work better than others, offering a combination of practical advice and cultural insight, some are a little hit-and-miss, and others are just plain funny. The result is a guide with added depth and color that most of the book's competitors lack.
 
This approach, bolstered by To Asia With Love's diverse range of writers, gives the book a distinct voice, which is another one of its main strengths. Its conversational tone is more akin to a friendly local showing you around town - explaining the history of a particular noodle shop, or pointing out why joining a game of takraw is one of the best ways to break the ice with locals - than the drier, expert, font-of-knowledge cadence found in such industry stalwarts as Lonely Planet and Rough Guide.
 
To Asia With Love's editors realize that bombarding people with information doesn't equate with giving them knowledge. The facts, figures and "must stay" recommendations that commonly cram the pages of most guidebooks can often have a smothering effect.
 
Readers are overloaded with detail, which in many ways has the negative effect of limiting their ability to successfully navigate a destination. They become dependent on the information laid out in the guide.
 
The prevalence of established tourist trails and suggested itineraries put forward by many other guides also dulls the whole travel experience, diminishing the excitement of finding your feet in a foreign land and replacing it with a list of safe actions (though, to be fair, this is what many tourists want at the end of the day).
 
This is what makes To Asia With Love stand out from the crowd: its emphasis on helping readers to better understand a destination - rather than merely get lots of information about it - through the experiences of the contributors.
 
However, the general rule of strengths and weaknesses being the same thing rings particularly true here. While it does give readers greater contextual depth, it just doesn't contain the information that many people would consider essential before setting out. Don't expect pictures and maps, it's pretty much text all the way.
 
In part, it does counter this with the "Booking Your Trip" chapter, which arms readers with plenty of recommendations of websites, books and agencies for each country, but it still lacks the ease of the information-at-hand format.
 
At the end of the day, To Asia With Love probably works best in conjunction with a standard guidebook, thereby giving you the best of both worlds: stacks of information and plenty of color on each country.
 
If you're looking for a book that covers Thai etiquette and manners, the pleasures of eating khao soi in Chiang Mai, Ho Chi Minh City's coolest bars or how to return hospitality while traveling through Cambodia, then you'd be hard-pressed to find a better collection of informational snapshots on the day-to-day life in northern Southeast Asia.
 
Perhaps the biggest challenge the book faces is its name. Hopefully the people at Things Asian will realize this by the second edition and give it a title befitting its unique content, rather than one you'd expect from a publisher of pulp romances.
 
Greg Lowe is managing editor of Asia Books Publishing's New Arrivals magazine.
 
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