{"id":2943,"date":"2007-06-24T09:37:30","date_gmt":"2007-06-24T09:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2943"},"modified":"2007-06-24T09:37:30","modified_gmt":"2007-06-24T09:37:30","slug":"lonely_planet_f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2943","title":{"rendered":"Lonely Planet founder scopes out sensationally bad places"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2007\/06\/24\/TRGD7QILP21.DTL\">John Flinn<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>In nearly four decades of incessant globe-trotting, Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, has seen nearly all the planet&#8217;s sensationally wonderful places. He&#8217;s also seen the great places, the pretty good places, the so-so places and the not-too-bad places. There wasn&#8217;t much left to do but to start collecting passport stamps from the really bad places.<br \/>\nThe result is one of the most oddly compelling travel books in recent years, &#8220;Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil &#8212; With Additional Excursions to Places That Are Slightly Misguided, Mildly Malevolent, Seriously Off-Course, Extraordinarily Reclusive and Much Misunderstood.&#8221;<br \/>\nWheeler pulled off the Axis of Evil hat trick: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Then he moved on to Afghanistan, Burma\/Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and George W. Bush&#8217;s new favorite country, Albania, for a nostalgic look at the bad old days under Enver Hoxha.<br \/>\nThe obvious question is, uh, why? I asked Wheeler this over lunch in San Francisco recently. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Flinn: In nearly four decades of incessant globe-trotting, Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, has seen nearly all the planet&#8217;s sensationally wonderful places. He&#8217;s also seen the great places, the pretty good places, the so-so places and the not-too-bad places. There wasn&#8217;t much left to do but to start collecting passport stamps from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}