a travel guide in your wallet 

(essay)

Whether we go for a long weekend to Rome or half-year backpacking to India, we use travel guides. Although most of them are having tough times to sell today, there is still plenty to choose from: Blue Guides, Rough Guides, Frommer's, Fodor's, Lonely Planet, and National Geographic among many others. The choice on the internet is even greater. Yet, both print and screen travel guides limit us in our experiences: they instruct us where to go, what to do, and what to learn about a country. They tend to impose the vision of travel journalists. As a result, a traveller's experience is reduced to standardised actions without adventure and refined knowledge without wonder. Isn't it more interesting to see a foreign country through the eyes of those who run it? Why don't we have a look at how nations themselves choose to portray their countries?