ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY HENRIL DRESCHER

Back when I used to work for Lonely Planet—in the days before a travel snob in Alex Garland's The Beach famously announced, "I'm going to find one of those Lonely Planet writers and ask him, what's so f______ lonely about Khao San Road"—I visited a charming Dai-minority-run guesthouse in China's remote southwest. It had one of those fall-apart-at-the-seams guest books that bulge with ecstatic ramblings about paradise found and admonitions to other travelers to keep the faith: "Whatever you do, don't tell Lonely Planet." I'm afraid I did. Worse than that, I put it in the book. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize—and explain. I had no choice. The word was out, and if I hadn't done it, a rival guidebook writer would have, and then everyone would have been bitching about Lonely Planet's losing its edge.

There's no keeping paradise to ourselves, and I've often questioned our compulsion to do so. But my disquiet didn't come to a head until about six months after I'd quit guidebooks and was taking a break in southern Thailand. I was following a traveler's tip about a not-in-the-Lonely-Planet bay on the island of Ko Phangan. Though getting there involved hiring a boat and bobbing through choppy waters past forested hills to a crescent of white sand fringed with palms, it turned out to be a disappointment. If Lonely Planet was yet to discover the beach, travelers had not, and the dozen or so bungalows there were already full—which is how I ended up scrambling over a steep bluff, and stumbling onto the Sanctuary.

The Sanctuary was a surprise, and it was not just the offer of a colonic irrigation at check-in. Bungalow operations on the southern beaches of Thailand are of a kind: tatty, thatch-roofed huts on stilts that radiate out from an equally tatty restaurant that offers fried rice, French fries, banana pancakes and fruit shakes. The Sanctuary was different: a sprawling wooden structure built onto a rock face, with stairs leading up to a warren of bungalows. New Age music wafted through the vegetarian restaurant, and half the foreign travelers sprawled out on cushions were there on weeklong, supervised fasts. It was difficult to see how all this had sprung up overnight, but if it had not, it was equally difficult to see how it had slipped through the net of the guidebook industry. At dinner, I joined Michael, the Sanctuary's Irish manager, and asked him how it had remained a secret. "For a long time, nobody knew we were here," he said. "There were 20, 30 of us. We'd turn up whenever we could get away. We built the huts up from the beach, in the trees, so you couldn't see them. You could sail past and you'd see nothing. We all knew each other. It was like a commune. You could drop in anytime."

"It was free?"

"Well, everybody contributed in some way. But it was free to stay here."

"What happened?"

"People started finding out. Turning up. People who weren't invited. We had to make a decision: disband it all or go commercial."

It was at that moment that it occurred to me I had stumbled upon the setting for The Beach. And, if anything, Michael's denials made me even more certain that this was the case. An hour or so after our conversation ended, a young English guy who was working in the restaurant wandered over and whispered, "It's true. It's The Beach. Alex Garland stayed here before he wrote the book."

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