Next time you’re about to take a trip, you might want to think twice before you pick up a Lonely Planet guidebook. Apparently at least one guidebook author thought it was OK to write about countries he’d never visited, among them Colombia:

A former Lonely Planet travel writer who provoked controversy after he admitted he did not always visit the places he reviewed today played down the “hyperbole” surrounding his revelations.

Thomas Kohnstamm’s book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? contains tales of living with a prostitute, dealing drugs and in one case, writing about Colombia, without actually visiting the country.

“They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia,” he told Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

“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.”

Kohnstamm told the paper he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.

The author claims that as a writer, it just isn’t possible to visit all the places you are asked to write about because you aren’t paid enough. Lonely Planet is denying that similar white lies are being told in any of their other guidebooks.

Via / Guardian