My life: Tony Wheeler

In 1972, when we had been married for only six months, my wife, Maureen, and I bought an old car for £60 and drove from London to Kabul. When we got there we sold it for a small profit and from Afghanistan we continued through Southeast Asia and ended up sailing from Bali to Australia by yacht. While living in Sydney, we found people were interested in where we'd been and how we'd done it so we decided to publish Across Asia on the Cheap and that's how Lonely Planet started. The book sold well and inspired us to write Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, so we spent 1974 back on the road. Ours was the first guide to a region that wasn't well known as a tourist destination at that time.

We were definitely shoestring travellers. We wrote guides for young people like us, who travelled slowly and lived on a budget. There's a lot of talk today about how tourism damages the environment but I think there are compensating factors. Shoestring travellers have more contact with locals and tend to put money into local communities rather than multinational companies. Lots of places rely on tourism and would be in far worse shape if people stopped visiting. Travel has changed: placing an international phone call used to take hours, if you could get through at all. In the days before e-mail you would go to post offices en route, sift through a pile of mail looking for letters from home and sit on the steps of your hotel to read them. Some of the romance has gone and I'm glad I had those experiences. It's still a habit of mine to note down the hotels I stay in and how much they cost. Earlier this year, I paid US$12 for a room in a church mission guesthouse in the Solomon Islands.

I always enjoy coming back to Hong Kong. I've stayed in Chungking Mansions quite a few times and I wouldn't feel I'd been to Hong Kong if I didn't go in and change some money or have a curry. I don't stay there any more, though. In the 1970s, one of the first things you did when you came here was to go up to the border and look into China, which was inaccessible to tourists at the time. Far more places around the world are open for travel than there used to be. I've recently been to the Congo, Colombia, Papua and New Guinea, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Israel, Palestine and Pakistan researching my next book, which I think might be called Travels in Fairytale Lands. I'd really like to get to Yemen and I haven't been to many of the "stans".

Guidebooks help you get to grips with places quickly. They help you find your way from the train station to a hotel when you arrive in an unfamiliar town. They educate, explain things and make sure you don't miss the highlights. I really like it when someone gets a kick out of using one of our guides, particularly if it takes them to places they wouldn't normally consider visiting.