Maureen and I went back to school in London this week. Teach First is an innovative campaign that puts young university graduates on a fast track teaching programme which propels them into often challenging school environments. Maureen and I went along to talk about how geography had influenced our careers. You’d expect us to be enthusiastic about geography wouldn’t you?

Maureen went to Mellow Lane School in Hillingdon, just north of Heathrow Airport while I headed east to Debden Park High School, where I joined Teach First’s Hamish Reid with his Year 9 (age 13 and 14 class) geography class. Perhaps we’ve inspired some Lonely Planet travellers in the years to come.

Teach First was inspired by the Teach for America organisation in the USA and is popping up in other countries around the world.

Maureen and I are in Mumbai for the launch of the Indian edition of the Lonely Planet magazine. The UK edition launched 12 months ago and our partners BBC-Worldwide are launching more editions around the world including – on Friday 29 January – in India.

So we're in India helping to launch their edition, an activity that includes a Bollywood style party tonight. With 2000 people! The magazine takes some of the UK content, adds a lot of local content and gives the whole thing some real local flavour. The first issue came in at a bulky 226 pages and it looks great. It’s also great to see our magazine on the newsstands or ads like the one above I spotted in Colaba this afternoon.

Way back in 1973 Maureen and I published the first Lonely Planet guidebook. We were living in a basement flat in the Paddington, a suburb of Sydney. That's Maureen 37 years ago at the kitchen table where we put together that first book. She's still a Dylan fan.

Across Asia on the Cheap, our very first book, cover- ed all the way from London to Sydney in 96 pages. It sold 8500 copies, all of them in Australia and New Zealand. Fast forward to 2010 and our 100 millionth book has rolled off the presses, a copy of our current bestseller Australia. Click here to read more about how we got there and the com- petition we're running to celebrate that milestone. Or click here for a YouTube clip I made about what it means to me to have published so many books and how 100 million books is really just a shorthand for the many more million travel stories we hope we have helped to inspire.

Saturday 13 February – 6 pm – Melbourne, Australia – I won’t be speaking, but lots of other people will be telling their ‘tales of Melbourne’ at the opening event for the city’s new Centre for Books, Writing & Ideas, now officially known as The Wheeler Centre. This ‘Gala Night of Storytelling’ takes place at the Melbourne Town Hall but there will be many events to follow at what I can officially call ‘my’ centre! 

March & April  – on 18 March I'll be speaking at the Nehru Centre in London. More details to follow. From 6-8 April I'll be in Sao Paolo in Brazil for the launch of the Brazilian edition of the Lonely Planet Magazine.

16-18 May – it's the Margaret River Arts Festival at that popular wine producing area south of Perth.  

Muang Khua, Laos - 2009

When Maureen and I arrived in Sydney the day after Christmas 1972, after a six month Asia overland trip from Europe, we had 27 cents left between us. In late 1973 we started Lonely Planet Publications ... read more

Thursday night – in Melbourne, Australia – I helped launch Divided Cities by Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press the book looks at the stories of five divided cities – Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia. I’ve visited four of those five cities (Nicosia is still on my ‘must go’ list) and since Maureen is from Belfast I’ve had a long acquaintance with that divided city.

Belfast is far more than Catholics on the Falls Rd and Protestants on the Shankill and it’s amazing how complex the divisions can be in any of these cities. When I visited Beirut a few years ago, and was wrestling with trying to understand the background, I bought a book which listed the huge number of groups – Christian, Muslim, Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, paramilitary, army and civilian – which fought it out over the years.

The Peace Monument in Beirut

The book then casually dropped into the discussion the useful fact that during the years of the Beirut civil war every single faction exchanged gunfire with every other faction. On one occasion – after a period of relative calm – a dispute broke out between two paramilitary groups over a queue for the skilift at one of the Lebanese ski slopes. Within 24 hours, as a result of this dispute, shells started arcing over the Green Line yet again.

Not all divided cities are war zones, when I was in school I lived for three years in Detroit – back when the city was a peaceful and prosperous place to live – but at a time when the divisions which have wrecked that city were already incubating. Detroit has become the classic doughnut city, a hollow, emptied out, impoverished centre, divided from prosperous suburbs which have abandoned the centre. I revisited Detroit in the mid-90s, on my coast-to-coast by Cadillac road trip.

When I visit the US today I’m always dispirited to see the development of gated communities, wealthy enclaves dividing themselves off with walls and security gates from their less prosperous neighbours. We should worry anytime we see such divisions springing up. They’re a stepping stone towards the far worse situations this book warns against.