Giving back in Nepal: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Sherpa school built by Sir Edmund Hillary’s Himalayan Trust

by Don George on

May 29th marked the 58th anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary. Among those celebrating this momentous accomplishment were the staff and students at the Khumjung School in the Nepalese village of Khumjung. This is the first school built by the Himalayan Trust, the foundation Hillary established after his return from the mountain.

The school has a special reason to celebrate: This year is its 50th anniversary, and as such, it is an inspiring symbol of the enduring bond between Hillary and the people of Nepal, and of the vital, life-changing work – not only with schools, but also with clinics, monasteries and reforestation efforts – that the organization has done and continues to do.

Hillary passed away in 2008, but the work of his Trust continues in partnership with the American Himalayan Foundation. I recently had the pleasure of discussing Sir Edmund’s legacy and the Trust’s ongoing projects with Norbu Tenzing, son of Tenzing Norgay and Vice President of the American Himalayan Foundation, at the organization’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Don George: When and how did you first meet Sir Edmund Hillary?

Norbu Tenzing: I first met Sir Ed and his son Peter in Darjeeling when I was 3 or 4, but it wasn’t until I was 7 that I went on a trek to the Khumbu with my father for the first time. This was in 1969. While I remember celebrating my 7th birthday playing soccer at Everest Base camp and spending time with my grandparents at their village, I also remember that Sherpas back then lived very traditional lives and very few children were in school.How would you characterize Hillary’s relationship with and impact on the Sherpa community?

I first truly understood the impact Sir Ed had on the Sherpas during his funeral in Auckland a few years ago. In the way he was mourned, he was accorded the same stature as that of a High Lama. In fact, you will find photos of him in the prayer rooms of many Sherpas in the Khumbu region. A very visible indication of how he transformed the lives of the Sherpas will be seen in Khumbu on May 29 when Sherpas from all walks of life, from all over the world, will celebrate 50 years of education and pay their respects to the man who made it all possible.

In this regard, I think this quote from a speech Sir Ed gave at an American Himalayan Foundation dinner in 2003 is especially poignant:

“I have been fortunate enough to be involved in many exciting adventures. But when I look back over my life, I have little doubt that the most worthwhile things I have done have not been standing on the summits of mountains or on the North and South Poles – great experiences though they were. My most important projects have been the building and maintaining of schools and medical clinics for my good friends in the Himalayas – and helping with their beautiful monasteries too. These are the things I will always remember.”

How did Hillary’s involvement with schools in Nepal start?

On his return to the Everest region a number of years after his ascent of Everest, Sir Ed asked a Sherpa friend what he could do for them. The Sherpa friend replied, “Burra Sahib (big Sahib), our children have eyes but they cannot see. Therefore, we want you to open their eyes by building a school in our village of Khumjung.” He immediately began to raise funds for the school; it opened in 1961 with 50 students. That was the beginning of his work in the Everest region. In addition to the 50th anniversary of Khumjung School, this year marks the 28th anniversary of the American Himalayan Foundation’s partnership with Sir Ed’s Himalayan Trust.

How has the Hillary foundation and dream evolved through the years?

When our chairman Richard Blum first met Sir Ed more than thirty years ago, his work with the Sherpas – which he often called the most important of his life — was already underway. Sir Ed needed partners, and we said yes. Over the past three decades, our involvement has only deepened. We have been the Trust’s steadfast partner in their work: supporting 63 schools, where more than 6,000 Sherpa children receive a good education; medical care at 13 clinics and two hospitals; reforestation projects that have resulted in 2 million new trees; and ongoing maintenance and restoration of Tengboche and Thame monasteries. Our long-standing partnership with Sir Ed and the Himalayan Trust is one that we cherish. The real dream of Sir Ed was that the Sherpas should run the Himalayan Trust in Kathmandu, and he realized that dream several years ago.

What is the AHF’s current program in respect to schools in Nepal?

AHF makes it possible for children to be educated by funding the essential ongoing school expenses: books and supplies for the 63 schools (27 built by the Himalayan Trust) in the Mt. Everest region; teacher training, including English language training; teacher’s salaries; college scholarships; and the all-important components of school lunches for the Khumjung School hostel – a cook and food stipends for the poorest kids.

Is there any particular educational success story that stands out for you?

There are many, but one great example is Ang Rita Sherpa. He was part of the first graduating class, and he now runs the Himalayan Trust in Kathmandu and oversees all of their work in Nepal. Other graduates have become doctors, pilots, entrepreneurs, and environmental leaders. The big story here is that because of a good education, the Sherpas have been able to chart their own destinies. Sherpas really believe and they have proven, over and over, that education is the key to their future. They have done this while keeping their cultural identity strong. Sir Ed could not have hoped for anything better.

What is your dream/goal for the project going forward?

Our dream and goal is that the Sherpas continue to excel in their education while maintaining their cultural identity. But to make sure this happens, nothing would make us happier than to know that they will always be able to go to school. And for that we need financial support from friends around the world. We are deeply grateful for – and dependent on – the many people who still believe in Sir Ed’s dream.

For more information about the Himalayan Trust and the American Himalayan Foundation, visit the American Himalayan Foundation’s website.

Top tips for TBEX and other writers’ conferences: What I’ve learned from 20 years of success stories at Book Passage

by Don George on

When Elaine Petrocelli conceived the idea for the first Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference 20 years ago, she didn’t know what she was getting into. “All I really knew was that I loved great travel writing and photography, and I thought it would be fascinating to bring the best writers and photographers together for a few days to talk with aspiring writers and photographers about what they do and how they do it,” says the co-owner of Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, California, where the conference is held for four days each August. To help realize her dream, Petrocelli contacted the then travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle – who, as luck would have it, was me — and I contacted legendary travel writer Jan Morris, who agreed to be the first guest of honor, and the Book Passage conference was born.

That was 20 summers ago. We certainly didn’t imagine then that two decades later conference alumni would have published hundreds of articles and photographs in national magazines and newspapers, and dozens of books that directly resulted from contacts made and lessons learned at the conference. We didn’t think that some alumni would be so successful that they would return in future years as members of the conference faculty. And we didn’t dream that we would be celebrating in 2011 with the most ambitious Book Passage Travel, Food and Photography Conference yet.

We’ve learned a lot over the past 20 years and the conference has evolved to embrace those lessons. We’ve added food writing and photography to the menu and focused more and more on writing for the web, blogging and self-publishing. We’ve included in-the-field workshops and one-on-one evaluations, expanded the faculty and fine-tuned the panels and events. And we’ve added karaoke!

Most importantly of all, we’ve learned from the successes of our participants what it takes to get the most out of attending a conference — whether it’s Book Passage or other creative conferences around the country. Thinking ahead to TBEX in June and to the many other summer gatherings now offered, I thought it would be helpful to share the top tips I’ve learned from successful students.

Fittingly enough, as I’ve put these together, I’ve realized that these tips can equally be applied to getting the most out of any journey:1) Know before you go
Do your research before your journey starts. Know everything you can about the territory: the conference schedule (when do activities start and end, when are the break times, when do you eat, when can you rest), the venue (how far is it from your hotel to the event, where is food, caffeine and cabernet available), and the faculty (what are their blogs and their books and their areas of expertise – if at all possible, read their work before you go).

2) Plan your itinerary
Know who you definitely want to meet (authors, photographers, editors, publishers, producers, participants), and what subjects you want to learn about (at TBEX, for example, this could be making money from blogging, working with pr people, maximizing technology, and/or refining your non-fiction narrative style). If you want to be sure to meet author X and learn about subject Y, mark that author X is reading on Friday at 7 pm and subject Y is being discussed at a panel on Saturday at 10 am, and map your schedule accordingly (this is especially handy when someone spontaneously asks if you want to go to dinner on Friday).

3) Be a sponge
When I’m on the road on assignment, I try to absorb everything; I pick up brochures, postcards, menus, facts. I know I’ll end up discarding 90 percent of them, but since I’m not sure at the time which 10 percent I’ll want to use, I vacuum up everything I can. Past participants say the same applies to conferences. You won’t be able to attend that reading, workshop or panel after it’s over, so do everything you can while you can (and yes, this includes karaoke).

4) Embrace serendipity
Once you’ve crafted your carefully planned itinerary, don’t be afraid to detour from it. My best travel stories always come from serendipitous connections – the artist I meet through a chance encounter, the festival I hear about along the way. I love the story of the Book Passage student who by chance sat at a table with an editor from a publishing company, started talking about his travels in Europe and ended lunch with a contract for a book. If you meet someone fascinating or stumble upon a subject you know nothing about that instantly intrigues you, go with the flow. Dozens of students’ stories affirm that the life-turning, career-changing encounters were unplanned and unforeseen. When the universe opens a door, walk through it.

5) Practice the art of vulnerability
It’s a lesson I keep re-learning in my travels: The more open you are to the world, the more the world rewards you. Open yourself to the people and lessons around you. Embrace the risk; trust in the kindness of strangers. As countless students at Book Passage have found, if you really want to talk to Tim Cahill, pluck up your courage and approach him. (You’ll find he’s remarkably friendly.) And at TBEX, Book Passage and other conferences, you take out only as much as you put in. The more you leave there, the more you’ll bring home.

6) Keep the journey alive
The road doesn’t end when the conference ends. That’s just the beginning. Follow up with the contacts you’ve made. Incorporate the lessons you’ve learned. There’s no such thing as overnight success: All success is the result of hard work and respectful persistence. Pursue your passion; follow your dream. There’s no guarantee where your journey will take you, but as I learned long ago on the Karakoram Highway, there’s only one way to get there: step by step.

Why I love Italy: five inspiring insights from an evening with Frances Mayes

by Don George on

Earlier this month I had the transporting opportunity to interview Frances Mayes on stage as part of the National Geographic Traveler Conversations series in Washington, DC. I actually met Mayes in the early 1980s, when I moved to San Francisco. I had told my creative writing graduate school poet-mentor that I was moving to the Bay Area, and she told me that I should be sure to look up the poet Frances Mayes. I did and Mayes helped introduce me to the cultural riches of the city. This was years before Under the Tuscan Sun catapulted her into the kind of best-sellerdom poets can only dream of. That passionate, transformative memoir has spawned many subsequent books on Italy, including her most recent and delightful work, “Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life.” In our conversation, as in her books, Mayes was passionate, articulate, and electrically alive to the senses and seductions of Italy. Here are five of the many Italy-inspired insights I took away from our talk:

1) The rhythms of Italy: Poetry, Mayes said, was all she ever intended to write. But something happened after she bought and moved into Bramasole, her house in Cortona:

“I started writing longer lines and lines didn’t any more want to be cut at where the line break goes in a poem. I started keeping notebooks and it just started expanding, and I found myself writing prose. I never intended to and I think that it’s just mysterious that sometimes the rhythms in your brain change and your genre follows after that. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I did start writing prose because I was writing out of excitement at living there and leaning a new language, meeting people. It was very spontaneous and in fact all of my books about Italy have been written out of just spontaneity and fun.”

It’s fascinating to me how the rhythms of a place can infiltrate us and change the way we create, even how we move through the world. This phenomenon has certainly been true in my own life. In the hard Grecian sunlight, I’m more decisive and my writing is brighter. More vivid. More clearly etched. In France, my sentences are more languorous, more nuanced, more apt to while an hour or two away over a café crème, watching the perfumed passersby from a windowside seat at a café by the Seine. In Hawaii, I surrender myself to sun, sand, and sea. In Japan, I’m attuned to intricacies, shadows, the larger meanings of little things. 2) Italy is old and ever new: Last summer was Mayes’s 20th anniversary of living in Cortona, and yet, she said,

“Tuscany is still new to me. That’s what is so unpredictable. You think that you know a place after 20 years, but Italy is such a remarkable country. Maybe this is because they only unified – to put it loosely, they haven’t really unified — 150 years ago. Because they had such a long history of small papal states and little kingdoms, everything stayed very individual: different dialects, different pasta, different artists, different colored stone. It’s still like that. Even if you’ve lived there 20 years, you can still go 30 miles and be somewhere that you’ve never seen before – some little tiny village or hill town that’s really intriguing. There’s always something really interesting and new to discover. And of course learning a new language is the same thing.”

First of all, I love the sense of possibility in these words – the way when you know and love a place well, it keeps revealing itself in new and expanding ways. (Mayes used as an example of this her discovery in January, in Friuli, of a Byzantine church floor mosaic about the size of an auditorium. “I’d never heard of it and it was stupendous. And we discovered it just by haphazardly visiting this wonderful old Roman town,” she said.)

This has been true for me everywhere I’ve lived – precious pocket musees in Paris, overlooked archaeological sites in Athens, mossy cemeteries and senbei shops in Old Tokyo, parrot-loud parks in San Francisco. It’s a great lesson: the more you know, the more you have to learn.

Secondly, I love the analogy that a language works the same way. It’s so true! You think you know a language well and then you stumble into linguistic neighborhoods you’d never known about before. Or you discover the past perfect subjunctive and it’s like a whole new swath of grammatical jungle has revealed itself with raucous birds and impossibly lush flowers. You can never exhaust a language or a place.

3) The lessons of the Tuscan table: I asked Mayes if there was one meal that stands out for her as a particularly unforgettable feast. She said it would have to be the first of the many eight-hour fests they have been invited to in Cortona.

“This was a First Communion dinner a friend had for her two boys. There were about 150 people there. When we arrived, they’d passed around 30 antipasti already. Next they served two pastas they had made, and then several secondi. After that four men came in the back door holding a tray big enough to hold a human. This was the thigh of a Val di Chiana cow that was so big they had it roasted in the hotel oven in town. They passed around this wonderful roasted beef and potatoes. Next thing I knew my husband Ed was on his feet singing a song he’d never heard of with four other men. He was feeling really good because two women had asked if he was in film. I think we were the first to leave and we staggered out about eight hours later. As we drove off, Ed said, ‘I just hope we’re around when those two boys get married.’

“When I first started having Italians over,” Mayes continued, “I remember being thrown because they would often turn up with a couple of extra guests. I had the table set for 8 or 10, and they’d say, ‘Oh, so-and-so was in town so we’ve brought him,’ and I’d think, ‘Oh great.’ I’ve since come to think how wonderful that is in a way because it shows how naturally they entertain, how they think about food, and how they experience the table. Put in another handful of pasta, pull up another table, va bene. So now when we go someplace, we sometimes bring an extra guest too.

“Food is such a good reflection of the culture. Food is never cult in Italy. For example, I have never heard food associated with guilt, never heard someone say, ‘That looks so fattening.’

“Another thing I love about the Tuscan table is that nobody stays in their place. Our friend Marcos says that it’s best to have 25 at table. I’ve come to think that’s right – I used to think six was the best – because in the course of the evening everybody moves several times so everybody gets to visit with everybody else. I love that.”

4) Openings and art:

“Another thing I’ve loved in Tuscany,” Mayes said, “is the sense of the open door. Our house is very at home in the landscape. And when I first saw it, I remember thinking that if I lived there, I could be at home there too. There are no screens. The doors are open, the windows are open. The butterflies go in one window and out the other. The neighborhood cats run through the house. The house is open and therefore the mind is too, and that has influenced me quite a bit, opened up my writing quite a bit. It gave me the confidence to try to write a novel, for example.

“Italy is a wonderful place to be a writer – there’s something about living in beauty. Art is taken for granted when you grow up bouncing a ball against the Orvieto Cathedral. Beauty is just something that is part of their breathing. As a writer, it was wonderful to be in a place where the arts are taken much more as a natural part of life, not afar but normal.”

5) Living on Tuscan time: There is a different sense of time in Italy, Mayes said.

“Tuscans are at home in time because they have so much time behind them. They don’t have the sense that life is a frantic thing to master. It’s more like time is a river and you’re in it. Down at the bottom of our hill, Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 BC, and sometimes we’ll go to dinner at somebody’s house and they’ll be talking about whether Hannibal came from the south or another route, and whether he’d lost his eye by then or not. You’d think Hannibal could walk in the door….

“So they do have this really long sense of time. Our little town was one of the original 12 Etruscan cities. The town walls date from 800 BC. You live in layers of time, you’re conscious of it because of the landscape. The landscape is still so similar to the background in those Renaissance paintings that you feel like there’s a continuum of time that you’re in, so you feel less crushed by time and more in it.”

The aerogramme and the email

by Don George on

Once upon a time, the cheapest, most convenient way for travelers abroad to write to friends and family back home was the aerogramme. This ingenious creation was a razor-thin, super-light, roughly 6-x-11-inch sheet of blue-colored paper that was designed to be folded into thirds, creating six postcard-size panels (both sides of the paper were used).

One of these panels was pre-stamped and printed with dotted lines for the recipient’s address; four of the panels were blank, to be used for writing your message; and in the Greek aerogramme that lies before me now, the other panel features a photo of whitewashed buildings rising up a rocky brown hill against a deep blue sky.

Adjoining the stamp-and-address panel were two gummed flaps; when you finished your message, you licked and folded these flaps to seal the note. Then all you had to do was drop the aerogramme into a mailbox. No weighing, no paying, no standing in line. This was the height of epistolary convenience when I lived in France, Greece, and Japan in the 1970s.

The challenge, of course, was how much information you could squeeze into those four blank panels – how precisely and minutely could you write and still be legible? On that Greek ‘gramme to my parents, I managed 60 lines of about 11 words each, enough to cover the highlights of a spring swing through Egypt (riding Arabian stallions four hours into the desert, climbing the Great Pyramid, touring the temples and tombs of Luxor), a quick outline of plans for my just-starting summer trip (staying with friends in Nairobi and exploring Kenya on day-trips, climbing Kilimanjaro and going on safari in Tanzania with the family of two of my Greek students, then returning to the States via Santorini and Paris), plus the obligatory update on my financial situation.

Writing home is a whole lot easier in 2011. The digital equivalent of the aerogramme isn’t confined to six panels, and doesn’t take weeks to reach its intended recipient. You can write as much as you like, and send it to as many people as you like, and it arrives instantaneously! And still no weighing, paying, or waiting in line (unless you count the occasional wait for an open terminal at an Internet cafe). Though the Internet hasn’t reached every crack and crevice of the planet, I think it’s safe to say that there are vastly more digital post offices now than there were stone-and-stucco ones back in the day. And what about that evocative photo of those whitewashed hillside homes? Now you can attach your own.

Luckily, my parents kept big rubber-banded bundles of my aerogrammes so that I can peruse them now, but with emails, you don’t have to rely on anyone; you can store them yourself. And instead of having to paw through bundles of letters when you’re looking for a specific passage 35 years later, you can effortlessly search your archives to locate that stallion’s-eye view of sunset in the Sahara. So convenient!

Is there any downside to this technological evolution? Well, maybe just this one. There’s a kind of palpable poignancy to that Greek aerogramme. I hold it in my hands, trace the rough letters and creases in the page, smell its musty perfume – and it’s a pale blue magic carpet that whisks me back to the moment in the Athens airport when I sat at a small table, with a demitasse of Greek coffee, scribbling. I taste the thick, bitter coffee, the sludgy residue on my lips, feel the dry dusty heat, the anticipation in my fingertips….

Will my emails transport me that same way when I read them three and a half decades from today?

Lonely Planet maps the future: a conversation with CEO Matt Goldberg

by Don George on

Matt Goldberg joined Lonely Planet as CEO in March 2009. Before joining Lonely Planet, he was senior vice president of digital strategy and operations for Dow Jones & Company in New York, where his responsibilities included leading business operations for The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. I spoke with him in November.

DG: Why did you move to Lonely Planet?

MG: First of all, to be selected to lead a company that was so important to me personally in my own travels and that plays such an important and meaningful role in the world by encouraging and empowering people to go out and experience the world, was nothing short of humbling. When I pinched myself and realized that I received the offer, there was no question in my mind that I would sell my house in the worst economic climate in history, pull my children out of school, and move 12,000 miles away — because to my mind, there is no company more deserving of its reputation than Lonely Planet. It’s going through an incredible period, like any content company in any category, and I’m passionate about one question: How do esteemed media brands, products and services make the successful transition through this period of extraordinary technological innovation? I have spent my career thinking about that question, and I am putting all of my energy into helping Lonely Planet make that transition successfully.

DG: Has your sense of Lonely Planet’s challenges evolved very dramatically since you joined the company?MG: Well, certainly you don’t really know until you become operational on a day-to-day basis what the challenges and opportunities are going to be. I have to say that I’ve been impressed with the number of opportunities. Our core publishing business remains profitable. And while the guidebook market as a whole has decreased, Lonely Planet has continued to invest in new products and really tried to drive innovation and new ways of working so that not only can we remain number one in the world in that core business, but we can extend our lead and grow share, which is what we’ve done in 33 out of the last 34 months.

DG: What would you say are the major innovations that Lonely Planet has introduced since you’ve been there?

MG: Lonely Planet has long thought is there a way of changing the way we gather, manage, access, and distribute content so that we can be more platform agnostic. We’ve finally cracked the code on that one and made the investment over the last 18 months where we can send an author into the field, give them the tools through a mobile device to upload their work immediately onto a platform that’s totally dynamic and can immediately be useful, whether we’re producing a book or programming a web site or delivering a digital app through a mobile channel or a tablet PC. I knew this was real when we introduced what we were doing to our authors, and we had Tony Wheeler sitting in a café in Melbourne actually using this technology to show how we could change the product in real time.

We now have the opportunity to organize ourselves as a business around that technology and be totally product development focused and serving travelers in a way that they’re already signaling to us they’re going to want to leverage our content in the future.

DG: How does this impact the traditional guidebook? You have a print book that was published let’s say a year ago. You have a user who bought it last month and they’re in the destination now. Are they able to access updated restaurant and hotel information, for example? How do you integrate what they have in their hand as the print product and the new information that has become available since that book was published?

MG: We continue to believe in the future of the book as a technology. It’s over 5 centuries old and has features that continue to remain valuable and useful to users today. We know that the future of the book is all about emerging form factors, the way that that book integrates with digital platforms, and the way that we as publishers sit in the middle of the content production process and offer useful curation and services. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about the integration of physical and digital products. . I think there are opportunities in the future that Lonely Planet will be best positioned to deliver. You can imagine using your Smartphone and taking a snapshot of an image in a book and that triggers the download of the freshest content onto your mobile device, which enables you to then leave the book in the hotel and use that mobile device to create a mashup with maps to navigate your experience in the destination. That future is here now and we are experimenting on those kinds of things. We will bring products and services to market that we think consumers will pull through.

DG: To my mind there are two intersections of challenges in guidebook publishing. One is the chronological challenge of when the research is done, when the book is written, when the book is printed, and when it gets onto bookstore shelves, which you’ve just addressed. The second is the emerging challenge of the whole expert vs. crowd-sourcing issue. How is Lonely Planet navigating that second challenge?

MG: We still believe in the value of expertise and we are totally committed to the partnership we have with our freelance authors. We also recognize the value of our community, because you only have to go on Thorn Tree to see how rich the dialogue there is, even on a very early web platform. And there’s no doubt that crowd-sourcing also has its place. So I think the question is to identify when each of those sources is most useful. Expertise is really helpful when you’re trying to sift through the noise – when you’re trying to offer a curated experience, when you’re trying to make trusted editorial selections and informed judgments. A community is really useful when you’re trying to get up-to-date questions answered. Crowd sourcing may be really useful for commodity content which you don’t want to spend trouble and effort to get, like a phone number, opening and closing hours, or an address. I think it’s our job as a company that brings all this together to determine which is most useful when. What I say to our authors is that I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be a content producer, as long as you embrace the 21st-century technologies and tools that are available.

DG: That leads to my next question: There’s the iconic traditional LP author who ventured out into the middle of nowhere and wrote the first books and then rewrote those books, and then there’s this emerging 21st-century person who’s agile with a video camera and an iPhone and is very technologically savvy. How much overlap is there between those two schools of authors?

MG: We’re learning that now, in the moment. And I’d just say that I’ve been impressed with the author body as a whole and their desire to embrace new ways of working. We recognize that we need to find ways to leverage the strengths of all our authors that we rate highly, and different authors will bring different skills to the table. Our job is to understand that and to do a good job mapping skill sets, capabilities and desires with products of the future that we’ll need. We will continue to need guidebooks in the future, just as we’ll need really creative mobile apps and interactive products and services. So I think there’s more room than ever for lots of different people to be engaged with content production and development at Lonely Planet.

DG: In my association with Lonely Planet there have always been two cultural challenges. On the one hand, there’s an Old LP mentality and a New LP mentality. And on the other hand, there’s an Australian mentality, an English mentality, and an American mentality. How do you as an American living in Australia, new to Lonely Planet but as someone who’s been using it for many years – how are you working with those challenges and bridging those cultural divides?

MG: Let me first say by way of context that it’s clear to me that Lonely Planet as an idea, and what it stands for at its heart, is bigger than any subculture or individual. It’s bigger than its founders. Lonely Planet is the way that we all connected to this thing that empowered us to have a remarkable individual experience. I had that first experience in 1994: I was in my mid-20s and I went away to Australia on my own. I didn’t know a single soul there and the first thing I did was to get that Lonely Planet guide. It was under my arm everywhere I went for that year and a half. It introduced me to places and people that I wouldn’t have otherwise had the idea to go meet. Ultimately it transformed me in some way. Everybody that connects with Lonely Planet – and we know there are hundreds of millions of them – has an experience like that one that they will never forget.

We stand for a broad idea that we can all believe in — travel. We can all connect to it very differently. Matt Goldberg who lived in New York and was working for the Wall Street Journal connects with it as deeply and meaningfully as Errol Hunt from New Zealand who has been an LP commissioning editor for many years and who has capabilities very different from my own on the editorial side. We both connect to travel just as deeply even though we come from two totally different worlds.

So I think if we stay true to that, you can bring this company together around a singular vision to produce amazing guides across all platforms – whether they be books, online, mobile devices — and in all geographies, whether in the English-speaking world or in any one of the other geographies that we’re excited about.

DG: What are your goals for the company in 2011?

MG: Our goals for the company are ambitious. We want to continue to support our core business and propel it forward through new product innovation and technology-enabled growth. We want to continue to experiment restlessly with new technologies and new platforms and serve new audiences that we know, when they find us, on whatever device, in whatever country, will love us because we share the same mindset. We want to focus on some new geographies, expand our relationships in China, enter the India market, and continue on our relentless pace expanding our share in the US; ultimately, we want to be the leader in the US. And finally, we want to work effectively with our shareholder, BBC Worldwide, to leverage their skill and expertise in areas where they can help us get going, like the magazine, which has been very successful, like television, where we’re making a real effort, like adjacencies that might take us into new spaces. They have shown their willingness to invest and their commitment to allow Lonely Planet to thrive based on its proud tradition. We need to continue to take advantage of that.

DG: What has been the greatest lesson that you’ve learned so far?

MG: Every media company in the world is playing in a landscape that’s as dynamic as we’ve ever seen. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the pace of change is just increasing. The start-ups with easy access to capital, with open platforms where they can innovate rapidly and eat your lunch, with very few barriers to entry, have never been more dynamic. The lesson is that it’s hard to make this transition and follow consumers and be there where the innovators are. It’s going to take time and we need as leaders in these kinds of businesses to be bold, thoughtful, and patient. I’m only a year and a half in and of course I’d like to run really, really fast, and I think we need to be thoughtful about where we make our investments, how we mitigate risk, and how we ensure that we’re innovating and experimenting restlessly. I think that’s a lesson for not just Lonely Planet but anyone who’s working in this dynamic media space.

DG: Have the metrics of success changed in the time you’ve been at Lonely Planet because it’s such a dynamic industry?

MG: When you are innovating in your business, you can’t hold your innovation activity to the same standard of success or metrics as you hold your core business. You actually have to look at it differently. You need to give innovation more room to breathe, you need to allow failure to happen and develop that and kill ideas that aren’t getting pick-up. You have to seed early success, put additional resource into successful ventures and iterate rapidly, following the consumer or traveler along the way, because the consumer ultimately will tell you if you’ve been successful because they’ll be engaged with the product, which will ultimately yield revenue growth and profitability. But it is important to differentiate. So my answer is that in our core business, our success metrics haven’t changed that much. Where things have changed is how we think about the innovation, the emerging areas of our business. We’ve had both success and failure. But I’m very proud of our successes, including more than 5 million downloads of our mobile apps in the iPhone apps store. [Update: Lonely Planet just passed 7 million uploads as of early January 2011.]

We have been at the absolute forefront of technology as it relates to travel, starting with our app for the Beijing Olympics, when we introduced a Mandarin translation guide as a launch partner with Apple, continuing to our city guides, to being the first augmented reality travel app for the Android platform, to being the leader in the travel space for e-books across all platforms, from Kindle, where we were a global launch partner, through to iPad, where we were a launch partner for a completely new type of travel ebook for our Discover series that had touchscreen, color, and 3000 hyperlinks enabled, to most recently being a launch partner for NookColor. So we continue to invest in innovation.

And I have to say that I recognize that is the Lonely Planet DNA, going back to Tony Wheeler putting together a rudimentary desktop publishing system before it was recognized that that was the future, to that early web site and Thorn Tree and the way we engaged travelers to get user-generated information before anyone ever said UGC, to putting mobile apps out on the Palm Pilot in the 1990s. So I recognize that we are carrying on a proud tradition that really started with the people whose shoulders we stand on.