Profile | Why the first Lonely Planet Thailand travel guide author fell in love with the country and its culture
- Joe Cummings, a veteran travel writer, musician and long-time Thailand resident, first visited in 1977 with the Peace Corps, but it wasn’t what he expected
- He mastered the Thai language, has acted in movies, and wrote the score to 2019’s The Cave, about the rescue of 12 boys from a cave in Chiang Rai province
My father, Will Joe Cummings, enlisted in the marines during World War II and served in the Asia-Pacific theatre. He met my mother, Mary Curtis, in Germany right after the war and they married in 1950.
Her father had been a commanding officer in Berlin, so I suppose you could say I’m a second-generation army brat. My father stayed on in the military and I was born in 1952 in New Orleans.
Nomadic youth
Until the age of 30 I never lived anywhere for more than three years. I can’t even remember how many places I lived in as a child, California, Kentucky, Texas.
When I was 10, the whole family was shipped off to France. I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t like I had a lot of friends in the United States because we moved so much, but I guess I worried that I wouldn’t know how to function there.
Conversely, when it was time to come back to the States, I didn’t want to leave Europe. During winter and summer vacations we went all over western Europe as a family, which was great. I just knew I was going to be bored when I got back to the States.
I had developed a very strong itch to travel and spent much of my time planning my escape. When I was 18, I finally did make it back to France, where I worked in a winery for the summer in Orange (a commune in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region).
