It's still possible. 99% of travellers proceed along narrow planks of tourist hotspots that represent 1% of what is interesting in the world. Once it was lonely planet trails, then tripadvisor routes, now instagram pin plots. It's so easy to step off those paths, and doing so is very rewarding. Use those guides as guides as to what what not to do - at least not for long.
It's fundamentally a bit of a gamble. The folks that keep doing it enjoy the gamble. There are some hills I've crested while bikepacking and some towns I've been through that have been absolutely gorgeous and those certainly help, but everyone I know who enjoys this kind of travel enjoys getting outside and getting a bit rough and dirty. I encourage everyone to travel like this as long as they feel safe (and it's important to remember that different genders, sexual minorities, and ethnicities will feel differing levels of discomfort in different locations so safety should always be top priority.) But if you don't like the gamble, then head to a resort and take a tour bus to the Taj Mahal!
You'll also meet a network of longer-term travelers who exchange info about where to go (and not go). You don't have to go somewhere that literally no one has been to see something a bit unique, magical, and mostly devoid of casual tourists.
I suppose it's not realistic to do this for a lot of destinations, but where it works it works well.
I now know well a tiny village I go back to regularly where I'm part of the small summer swell of visitors, to go fishing and sailing without a crowd of tourists, because getting there is a bit complicated without assistance.
Consider something like Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal. If you mentioned something about the Trans-Siberian Railway, everyone and their dog would recommend going to Olkhon. Not that many people actually went there, because the island is quite remote.
It was about first generation international travelers showing up with thousands of dollars in electronics in places with much less tolerance for wealth inequality, feeling entitled to selectively decide when to follow local customs.
I got the sense it's meant to give you a sanitized experience, so that locals can have their own places, but you don't feel excluded.
(I visited Paris and London pre-Instagram, doing about 3 days in each, turning my phone off as much as possible and trying to stick to paper maps)
For me, the Lonely Planet era was after the overland routes to India closed but before smartphones became popular. Flying started becoming affordable, and infrastructure in the form of backpacker hostels and printed guidebooks largely replaced the word of mouth as a way of sharing information. It became increasingly likely that if you discovered something nice off the beaten path, other backpackers had already been there and documented the place in a guidebook.
Probably right, I didn't leave North America until the twenty aughts. Things changed very rapidly in a short time between that first trip and just a few years later.
You can find the original one on archive.org if you'd like.
> I remember taking an overnight bus from India to Kathmandu. That bus was probably not more than $5. I remember that morning, after traveling all night, rolling down the Kathmandu Valley and seeing the Himalayas, and a whole city with zero cars.
Imagine all the cars in a big city in the 70s, with all the inefficient carburetors and the leaded gasoline fumes, and arriving at the above...
Nowadays, the not-beaten path probably also has concrete buildings and people on their smartphones. I remember doing a van tour in the steppe of Mongolia, for the last night the driver drove around until we saw someone on a horse. The tour guide asked that man if we could stay in his yurt, and Mongolian hospitality meant of course we could. In the yurt the family had a smartphone, I saw the USB-A plug for the charger, and it amused me that even in the middle of nowhere, Mongolia, people also had to try 3 times to plug in that darned cable...
When not in the internet café, many children and young adults play games on their mobile phones.
About 2 weeks ago I was in a coffee shop nearby and 3 adolescent boys were playing games there on their mobile phones. They bought a coffee to get access to free Wifi and then spend at least a couple of hours, perhaps all day, playing games.
Or a wikivoyage that tries to get you to drive through the most dangerous neighborhoods in Baltimore XD
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/The_Wire_Tour
(Every halfway edgy "tour" I did, I had a guide or was ready to handle things on my own, then did so.)
Everybody says they want to see the unspoiled remote village, but they actually go to Vang Vieng. The rough and ready backpacker accommodation of the past with a cheap bed and nothing else can’t compete with the place up the road with the pool and air conditioning.
There is remarkably little option to travel today like we did in the 90s. Because kids today don’t want that. You can spend £20/night on the place that would have been £20/night back then. But the £5/night place has been torn down and replaced with another £20 one.
But I agree Vang Vieng was for me tourist hell, though if you get on motorbike and just ride along those karst mountains through villages and unpaved roads it was much better, the problem was the village itself mostly and tubing, I despise much more Luang Prabang full of retired package tourists everywhere you moved, that was truly much more disgusting than VV.