Joe Cummings, the author of the first Lonely Planet Thailand travel guide, in front of the oldest guesthouse on Bangkok’s Khao San Road. Photo: Ian Taylor

 

by Thomas Bird

+ Joe Cummings, a veteran travel writer, musician and long-time Thailand resident, first visited in 1977 with the Peace Corps, but it wasn’t what he expected

+ He mastered the Thai language, has acted in movies, and wrote the score to 2019’s The Cave, about the rescue of 12 boys from a cave in Chiang Rai province

 

My father, Will Joe Cummings, enlisted in the marines during World War II and served in the Asia-Pacific theatre. He met my mother, Mary Curtis, in Germany right after the war and they married in 1950.

Her father had been a commanding officer in Berlin, so I suppose you could say I’m a second-generation army brat. My father stayed on in the military and I was born in 1952 in New Orleans.

Nomadic youth

Until the age of 30 I never lived anywhere for more than three years. I can’t even remember how many places I lived in as a child, California, Kentucky, Texas.

 

When I was 10, the whole family was shipped off to France. I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t like I had a lot of friends in the United States because we moved so much, but I guess I worried that I wouldn’t know how to function there.

 

Full story: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3215583/why-first-lonely-planet-thailand-travel-guide-author-fell-love-country-and-its-culture

 

-- © Copyright South China Morning Post 2023-04-10

 

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Excellent

What an interesting story.

 

What an accomplished guy. 

A life well lived. Congratulations sir.

i still have his early versions very slim compared with bulky tomes nowadays

17 hours ago, webfact said:

author of the first Lonely Planet Thailand travel guide

Darn, I thought that author died in a motorcycle accident near Nana (ref. Private Dancer, by Stephen Leather) ????  (terrible book, actually, IMO. I still haven't finished it.)
Glad to know you're better than the guy in that book. ???? 

Very interesting.  Joe has done well.  We were in the same Peace Corps group (58).  I didn't see Joe much after we did the language training as I was all the way up in Loei. 

 

Pic is the day we arrived at Don Mueang airport mid-March 1977. Joe is toward the right side wearing dark sunglasses.

 

 

 

7 hours ago, 3NUMBAS said:

i still have his early versions very slim compared with bulky tomes nowadays

LP guides were the best source of reference before the internet age, i swore by them and were very helpful and always had one for the country's i was travelling to.

 

Travellers these days do not know how easy it is to travel compared to pre internet, personally i think the excitement of the unknown has been removed from travellers, i actually believe this myself and sadly would not ever buy another LP guide again, im actually surprised they print books in this day and age.

 

 

Great.

I used to thumb through Lonely Planet books in local library when getting to Asia seemed like an impossible pipe dream.

I've still a couple of copies sitting on the bookshelf above where I'm sitting right right now, back 20 odd years ago it seemed the best thing to have when I first entered Thailand,