Fodors, National Geographic, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves, Time Out. All are indispensable travel guides for your journey to X, Y, or Z, depending on your age/budget.

I won’t lie, I’m a huge fan of travel guides. Who isn’t? They plainly outline the most efficient use of your funds to provide you with the best food and accommodations possible. For just 15-30 dollars, you can receive advice on the most reliable budget hotel, brief but interesting background history on your destination, and awesome maps. Ranging from budget to high end, their rankings are economically minded, allowing you the ability to create a blueprint of your travels based solely on your all-important budget.

I hadn’t thought much about this pretty much universal approach to the travel guide culture until recently when a Cambodian coworker asked me what my favorite part of Cambodia was. His question actually took me by surprise. I have family and friends ask how Cambodia is all the time, to which I respond, “good.” But no one has really asked me what exactly I like about it. That requires more critical thought about my experiences here.

Ultimately, I decided that my favorite thing about Cambodia has been the people. The Khmer (their actual name as they prefer to be called, to be more politically correct) are an inspiring people, with an unquenchable fire for life, and a genuine kindness that I haven’t seen before. After being here for some number of weeks, I understand why those who have visited Cambodia love it so much.

But back to my answer. I’m sure most will agree with the age-old adage that it is the people who make an place, not the place itself. I don’t think that my answer was anything special or unusual, but Joe’s question did get me thinking about my approach to travel. If people are what make the experience, why am I so fixated on the how much sometimes? I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a meal strictly because I knew I was saving a couple of dollars. Nor have I been pleased with a museum just because Lonely Planet suggested it. Travel for me is experiential learning at its finest, and sometimes I think that the extraordinary process of this particular type of education is lost in the somewhat inflexible didactics of the travel guide.

I’m not saying that travel guides are completely focused on the economic perspective. They’re not. They of course take a wide spectrum of things into account. But I think that each travel guide has its own philosophy on travel, and in general, its easy to fall subject to their words of wisdom and become a little lazy in our own personal objectives. Travel guides can become a sort of security blanket for travelers, providing them the comfort of decoding the unknown, but masking the obstacle at hand— personal growth. Travel books, no matter how intelligent the author or highly regarded the brand of guide, are not written for YOU. Lonely Planet, for example, though written for the independent traveler and more liberal in content than that of its competitors, writes for a demographic of roughly 1.4 million individuals, as quantified by the website quantcast.com.

So as I near my last week or so here in Cambodia, I’m going to enjoy my time with the amazing Khmer coworkers that I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with. I may miss some outings to recommended tourist sites in the area, but thats okay. Because for me, this is a trip about deeper self-discovery, and I can’t think of any other way to discover myself than getting to know others.