The Book got its start back in Israel in the early 1970s, and by the early 1980s it was spreading around the world. Over the years El Lobo's version grew to become a kind of master edition, with up to 16 regional volumes describing most of South America. Dorit—warm, zaftig, practical—became a den mother to the Israelis and other backpackers. El Lobo expanded in the 1990s, adding 20 rooms and a sort of clubhouse, which used to be entered through an unmarked door in the kitchen. Today a thoroughly global crew of Israelis, Austrians, French, and even the occasional American can be found sitting back there on ratty sofas, playing board games, drinking $2 shots of Johnnie Walker, and watching Israeli comedians on the VCR. Lonely Planet finally discovered this back room, advising travelers in the 2001 fourth edition of its Bolivia guide to visit El Lobo and "take a look at their books of travelers' recommendations in both English and Hebrew." That single sentence is the only published reference to the Book I've ever seen.

To get to El Lobo's Book, a dark-haired Israeli staffer named Yiar led me past a pile of used camping stoves for sale and over to a chaotic shelf. With a grunt, he extracted a heavy notebook. Then another, and another—six in all, each carefully preserved under hard binders and butcher paper. Five covered, respectively, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Peru and northern South America. The oldest of the six was the crumbling, venerable 1989 volume.

The title page read:
livre international pour les voyageurs
international travel book
internationell resehandbook
libro internacional.

And so on, through Portuguese, Japanese, and what looked like Welsh, down to the last line, where someone had added, BOOK OF THE SMARMY, CONCEITED BEEN-THERE-DONE-THAT-SO-I'M-GROOVY-WANKERS.

The polyglot entries were random, frustrating, and beautiful, a carnival of ideas, pleas, boasts, and obsolete phone numbers. One page recommended the "beautikul girls" (sic) in a certain disco; the next tipped a particular ice cave as "a must" (at least until someone else scrawled a huge "NO!" over that entry). This was followed by a half-page in Japanese and a dense passage in German, with bar charts of altitude and diagrams of various plants; then there was an outpouring of druggie philosophy, which was daubed with retaliatory graffiti (SAD HIPPY WANKER).

After that there was a full-page scrawl devoted to buying a canoe in the rainforests of Peru's Manu National Park, with seven parentheticals and a postscript that wrapped around the margins sideways; a warning against so-and-so's couscous; and an ornate four-color drawing of a toucan named Felipe.

What differentiates the Book from other travelers' message boards from Kathmandu to Chiang Mai is what Yiar called "the warnings," special alerts about anti-Semitism. In an overwhelmingly Christian continent, the young israelitos are a welcome curiosity from the land of the Bible, but, as anywhere, small skinhead groups do exist in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. The El Lobo Book sounded an alarm about a hotel in Peru run by admirers of the Third Reich. Another entry cautioned anyone with "a shred of conscience" to avoid a hotel in Sorata, Bolivia, run by an alleged arms dealer, a man linked in police reports to, as the scribbler put it, "the shadowy rule of that great philanthropist Klaus Barbie."

A special CUIDADA page ("BEWARE") covered regular crimes and cons, citing rip-offs in Rio, bogus policemen in Bogotá, and grifters in La Paz. One sponger was always just a few dollars short of lifesaving surgery. ("Careful," someone added two years later, "he is still around.")

That touching up of a two-year-old tip reminded me why reading the Book is an experience fundamentally different from surfing message boards online. Israelis themselves do use Web sites like www.lametayel.com ("For the Traveler"), the portal of a popular REI-style superstore, to post some of the tips they used to carve in the Book. But anyone who has ever bogged down in Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree site knows that the Net's strengths are its weaknesses: The Web can be too broad, too accessible. Plucking wisdom from its infinite bramble of white noise can take all night. For the young Israelis, raised almost from the cradle with cell phones and computers, all that technology is just one more thing to escape when they hit the road. They search out online information until the day of departure but turn to the Book—in all its handmade glory—once their travels begin.