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"There's no way you can keep it out of Lonely Planet, and once that happens it's countdown to doomsday."

So says one of the backpacking characters in The Beach, UK author Alex Garland's controversial novel set in Thailand. Published in 1997, the tale of a failed beach utopia slowly caught fire in the Generation X book market and in January 2000 was released as a $40 million motion picture directed by Trainspotting's Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the disaffected backpacker-turned-bug-eating psycho. The story, which I first read in summer 1998, traces the fate of a small, loose-knit group of world travelers who decide to establish their own beach paradise on an island in Thailand's Ang Thong National Marine Park.

It's clear from the start that Richard (DiCaprio's character) and his erstwhile friends are trying to find a place in Thailand other travelers haven't yet found. The protagonists at the center of the novel are so convinced that the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand is to blame for crowding on Ko Pha-Ngan and other Thai islands favored by international backpackers that at one point in the novel, Richard suggests punching out the author of the Lonely Planet's Thailand guide.

That would, gulp, be me.

I slid down in my chair when I read that in the novel, and squirmed in my cinema seat when the film version depicted Bangkok's Khao San Road as a tourist wasteland. Having spent a good part of the last 18 years roaming Thailand with a notebook and microcassette recorder in hand, seeking out the undiscovered, had I become a spoiler?

Even Time magazine is getting into the act. In a recent issue of Time's Asian edition, the Travel Watch column reports on Moganshan, a mountain resort 200 km outside Shanghai, gleefully remarking that "no mention of the area is found in the hefty China editions of the Lonely Planet or Rough Guide travel books."

One minute Lonely Planet is giving away the store, and the next we can't even keep up with Time.

Meanwhile a few pages further on in the same issue - and appearing in the American and European editions of Time as well, a cover story on Leonardo DiCaprio ends with: "Two days after the interview I get the call I had been expecting. DiCaprio intends to send me a two-page fax, restating some of the themes he wanted to state in the article. Paragraph six includes excerpts from the Lonely Planet's guide to Thailand, saying how The Beach didn't cause environmental damage to the Thai island they filmed on."

Does this make me both destroyer and savior? What do people think, that if it weren't for Lonely Planet, everyone would stay home? It's difficult not to sit up and, mimicking a gun enthusiast, sternly remind the world that guidebooks don't trample beach dunes, people do. As Alex Garland, author of the novel on which the film was based, said in a Salon.com interview: "All of the Lonely Planet books … have a really good breakdown of the country, explanation of customs and so on, but I just don't know how many people read it, which isn't Lonely Planet's fault."

So what am I looking for as I drift across the Thai landscape, shaping the country's destiny as a tourist destination, as some people would believe? Actually, "unspoiled" beaches are the last thing I hope to find. Most "unspoiled" beaches I've come across in my two-plus decades of caroming around the kingdom were doomed before I ever got there. Doomed whether I wrote about them or not, doomed in the sense that their existence could not possibly be kept a secret for very long. As a matter of fact, I must confess I've never come across a beach that I hadn't already heard about from other travelers.

Can I preserve a beach by not writing about it? If I were the only person writing guidebooks to Thailand, it might be possible, but in a field crowded with competing guides, it's highly unlikely. On the other hand, by writing about the fragility of the coastal ecosystem, and about the many threats a beach may face - not just from tourism, but from shrimp farming, charcoal manufacturing, and other enterprises - I might be able to contribute to an awareness that could lead to appropriate conservation measures.

What interests me most isn't finding the undiscovered, it's finding the unappreciated. I'm looking for small things - little cultural signposts if you will - that tell me where I am. I try to bring in things you see on the street, things that can help people understand the culture, so that it's not just a straightforward search for a hotel or a beach.

But as Garland pointed out, a lot of readers ignore that stuff. They'd rather find the beach.

Long before 20th Century Fox arrived at Ao Maya on Ko Phi-Phi Leh, I was writing about environmental devastation in Ko Phi-Phi - Hat Noppharat Thara National Marine Park, of which Ao Maya is a part. Yet every time I visited Phi-Phi, there were more tourists than ever, many of them carrying Lonely Planet guides advising them not to visit Phi-Phi. Visitors continue to flood Phi-Phi because it is - or was - a pretty destination and the Thais have provided plenty of infrastructure catering to tourists. Take away that infrastructure and the numbers would plummet. Enforcing national park regulations in Thailand would go a very long way towards keeping the high worldwide demand for beach tourism from destroying the environment and diluting the culture. A guidebook can only do so much. Some responsibility must be cultivated by the host country and by the visitors themselves.

As for pushing farther and farther towards the ‘undiscovered’, I understand how people with a taste for adventure might feel when they come to a place and find a lot of people from their own culture there. I understand why people might get annoyed and bored by that. But when you want it to be all for you and you only - that I don't understand. People use Lonely Planet to find new places - and then when they find anyone else there, they become angry with LP! Did Sal and Daffy in The Beach read about the Ang Thong Archipelago - the setting for the infamous beach in the novel - in their Lonely Planet guide, or did they find it on their own?

This attitude that you're going to find some untouched part of Asia that no one else will see, that it will be your own private little experience - it's a rather counterproductive, delusional, and perhaps hypocritical western idea. People have this concept that they want to visit a non-western society, and they want to make sure no other westerner is there but themselves. The contradiction: If you're a westerner, and you're there, then your chosen spot is already "polluted." You're polluting it. Your moral choice: stay home, thereby restricting your knowledge of, and thus your participation in, the world outside your door; or travel consciously, learning what you can about the culture and environment, and treating both with respect.

If you're looking for authentic Asia, and having a hard time locating it, don't blame your guidebook. Blame your own imagination. Although finding a beach in Thailand (or anywhere in South-East Asia for that matter) that no other tourist has visited is probably impossible, it's easy enough to stay well off the package-tour circuit if you follow two simple rules. Rule one: Stay as far away from airports as possible. One reason three Andaman archipelagos - Tarutao, Similan, and Surin - have remained relatively free of environmental (and cultural) degradation is because you can't fly there, and you can't reach these islands in a 45-minute boat ride. Rule two: Forget about palm trees. Palm trees fuel the European taste for the exotic. Meanwhile Thais are bored with palms, which are no more exciting to them than your neighborhood elms. You'll find all of the non-palmy beaches of south Thailand - the ones lined with casuarina or sea pines, from Prachuap Khiri Khan to Narathiwat - to be so laid back you may have to pack your own lunch.

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