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Bradt Travel Guides…The Beginning

This month, Bradt Travel Guide founder Hilary Bradt shares with us the story of how Bradt Travel Guides started.

THE BEGINNING
by Hilary Bradt

To begin at the beginning. Right at the beginning. In 1964 I saw a performance of the play The Royal Hunt of the Sun at London’s National Theatre. It was about the conquest of the Incas, and the (fictional) relationship between Pizarro and the supreme Inca, Atahualpa. I was completely bowled over by the story. Hitherto I’d known nothing about the Incas and precious little about Peru. I set about reading everything I could about the subject and started planning a trip to South America.

In 1969 I stood at the Gate of the Sun in Machu Picchu and looked down an overgrown path that disappeared into the jungle. Where did it lead? I wondered. I had found only one travel guide that suited my purposes, and it was in my luggage back in Cuzco. The information on South America was scanty, as the book covered the whole world, but it was the inspiration in How to Travel Without Being Rich that mattered.

I hadn’t wanted to travel on my own, but the desire to see Peru — the country that had obsessed me for five years — was stronger than any fear. How to Travel Without Being Rich told me about the trade routes through South America and explained how I could travel by local bus from the Mexican border to Peru and down the Amazon. As a young, single woman I found the hospitality overwhelming and at times a bit alarming, but I learned how to look after myself and became a good judge of whether it was safe to follow up an invitation or not. I stayed with a family in Bogota so poor that they ate potatoes three times a day, and one in Quito where I rode thoroughbred horses and rang for the maid if I wanted coffee. And I had some scary moments alone with men with only one thing on their minds.

In 1973 I married George Bradt in Boston and we decided that instead of having a conventional honeymoon, we would backpack our way through South America, and finance the trip by persuading our friends and relations to give us money rather than wedding presents. To make this more interesting we made a list of what travel experience each present would provide: $5 for a hotel with a hot shower or bribe money for getting out of jail (unused!) to $100 for a day in the Galpápagos Islands. Our friends were generous and we set out with $1,800. We were still travelling – in Africa – four years later.

The writing really started with the wedding list. Whenever we did something special, whether it was a nicer than usual hotel at the end of a long trek, a special meal, or the much anticipated trip to the Galápagos, we each wrote a descriptive letter to the person who had earmarked their present to be used this way – a valuable exercise in ‘painting the picture’ in words. Our first guidebook, Backpacking along Ancient Ways in Peru and Bolivia, was another offshoot of having time on our hands during a long river trip and something to share with other backpacking gringos. And, yes, I found where that path from Machu Picchu went to: it’s now known as the Inca Trail.

Hilary Bradt co-founded Bradt Travel Guides in 1974 with her then husband George Bradt. The original Bradt guide — “the Little Yellow Book”  — came into being after a slow journey by river barge down one of the Amazon’s tributaries. Typed in the small town of Trinidad and printed in Boston, it sold for $1.95! Since then Hilary has authored 13 books, contributed to countless newspaper and magazine articles on a variety of subjects, and lectured worldwide on travel-writing. She swears that her total lack of a sense of direction has stood her in good stead as a guidebook writer: she knows the importance of clear, easy to understand directions.

Now your chance to share back!  Give us your best tips for travelling on a shoestring and your tips could be published in a future Bradt Guides Publication!  Just click on this link and share your tip!  You could also win a Bradt Guide of your choice for submitting your best tips!