All that sensitivity and grit may be bad news for Harvard. For 33 years, the “Let’s Go” travel guides written by Harvard students have been peerless arbiters of penny-wise, street-smart travel. Now “On the Loose” executive editor Andrew Barbour, 29, and his student staff are determined to unseat what Barbour calls Harvard’s “appalling glorified Yellow Pages.”
Both guides have the basics of modern tourism down, from visas to VD clinics. But since its start as a 20-page mimeographed pamphlet, “Let’s Go” has been more Great Book than mere travel tip sheet: it put a generation on the road. “Smoke a joint in a sauna with your girlfriend-out of sight!” gushed an early guide to Finland. Today’s “Let’s Go: Europe,” a far more staid encyclopedia of bargains, is the best-selling international travel guide in America and flagship of a 17-volume series that reaches 3.5 million readers a year.
Berkeley, by contrast, is just starting to perfect the art of getting lost on purpose, with four volumes on the shelf and four to follow this year. “If you want to be culturally sensitive, you have to branch out on your own,” says Courtney Heller, reciting the credo for all of Berkeley’s politically and ecologically conscious guides. Frostbitten English major Suzette Olsen learned to protect her lonely Alaskan campsite from bear attack by urinating around her tent. Scott McNeely, a senior, managed eight weeks in Romania without seeing another foreigner, part of that time submerged in a 20-cent mud bath “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” Antisocial rucksacker Roseanne Landay shunned a Washington state campground she found overly redolent of the “recreational vehicles, family occasions and Tupperware that you thought you’d escaped when you left home.” When the hyperopinionated “On the Loose” says a juice bar “sucks,” chances are it’s already crowded with travelers reading a certain other guidebook.
Does that make “Let’s Go” a victim of its own success? “Preposterous,” says Mark Templeton, 23, the series’ publishing director. “Like youth culture itself, ‘Let’s Go’ has changed a lot since the 1960s, and it will change some more.” Already following Berkeley’s lead, “Let’s Go 1993” is printed with soy-based ink. But Harvard hasn’t yet met “On the Loose’s” pledge to plant two trees in Costa Rica for every one felled to print its books-a promise that, given the true grit of these guides, might well mean a big new forest in Central America.
