A Guide to Guidebooks

With the rapidly increasing availability of Internet access throughout the globe, and the surge in the number of travellers toting smartphones, tablets, and netbooks, the market for guidebooks would appear to be only narrowing with time.  Certainly, when it comes to recency of information, you can not compare the freshness of an online post from hours ago with the stale data contained in a book that, even if only published this year, contains information from possibly several years ago.  Even putting recency to one side, who in their right mind would choose to lug a couple of kilograms of guidebooks around in their luggage if they had the option of storing that very same data electronically?  Trying to determine your whereabouts in a strange city via street signs and a guidebook map seems positively quaint when your smartphone's GPS/accelerometer/compass combination can show you exactly where you are with little chance of error.  

Guidebook sales are perhaps a more concrete indication that the physical guidebook is on the decline.  The average guidebook will shift 1,000-2,000 copies per year, and that number has been dropping significant percentages every year for the last few years.  Even a very popular guidebook will struggle to sell 10,000 copies per year.  It would appear that travellers are rapidly losing both the need and the desire for physical guidebooks.

My own travels have involved dozens of guidebooks which now take up two tightly-packed shelves in my bookcase, and I would not want to embark on any future trip without a guidebook in my shoulder-bag.  Here are my reasons why, in no particular order and given with the caveat that I realise that some of them are personal rather than necessarily objective:

• Comfort - in common with many, I don't like reading from a screen for extended periods.  I also like to be able to flick back and forth between pages that may not be adjacent, which is easy to do with a physical book but less so if you are having to scroll on an electronic device - this problem is exacerbated with small-screened devices.  In addition, there are times when I want to view several consecutive paragraphs, or a map, at the same time, which may not be possible with a small-screened device (unless I choose a minuscule font).
• Low maintenance - a book requires no battery power and no Internet access, and can cope fairly well with most conditions such as rain, dust, etc.  In fact, a bit of poor treatment will give character to it - the same can't be said of most electronic devices.
• Extendable - I can scribble hints, recommendations, new information, e-mail addresses, etc all over my guidebook, which may not be possible with electronic data.
• Memento - a guidebook, especially when "enhanced" with the above-mentioned scribblings, and with the creases, foxing, and grime acquired from constant page-thumbing, can induce the recollection of a whole host of memories once the journey has been completed.
• Safety - pulling out a guidebook or an electronic device in the middle of a crowded street will mark you out as a tourist, which can increase your chances of being mugged/robbed/pickpocketed, depending on where you are (though most of my travels have been conducted in countries where my physical appearance and clothes gave me away anyway), and hence is not advisable.  However those chances are increased more if what you have in your hand is a tempting gizmo rather than a battered book.
• Conversation starter - having your nose in an electronic device tells those around you nothing about what you're doing on it, and as such may be a barrier to them initiating a conversation with you.  If you're flicking through a guidebook, though, it's pretty obvious what you're up to, and that may be a convenient "in" for them.
• Cost - physical books are generally cheaper than their electronic equivalents, especially in the second-hand market.   (I should note here that Google Books can be a very useful resource - though the latest editions of guidebooks may only have a limited viewing capability on it, or none at all, older editions may be viewable in their entirety.)
• (Some) information - one obvious flaw of physical guidebooks is that the information contained within them is often years old, which is especially detrimental with regard to accommodation, restaurants, bars and other changeable aspects of travel.  However much of the historical and geographical information will still be correct, and that by itself can be worth having.

I'm not going to dwell much here on the merits of having ANY kind of guidebook, physical or electronic.  There is a school of travelling thought that says that guidebooks are fundamentally flawed, both in the way that they are researched and in the way that their recommendations can end up determining your trip rather than complementing it.  My view is that a guidebook is just one of several information sources that you should make use of, but it can really come into its own in certain situations, e.g. if you arrive in a strange town in the wee small hours and need to find a guesthouse in which to spend the night.

I should add that my travelling style would probably fit into the category of "flashpacker", i.e. I generally try to keep to a low budget by avoiding 5 star hotels and expensive restaurants but I have the financial capacity for a splurge every now and then.  Where possible, I try to travel overland by public bus or train, partly to save money, partly because I have the time, but mainly because that way of travel is more likely to bring me into contact with local people.

Visit any bookstore, or look on Amazon, and you will find guidebooks produced by a variety of companies.  Habitual browsers of the Travel section will know of Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Bradt, Frommer's, Fodor's, Footprint, Rick Steves, Moon, DK Eyewitness, Discovery, Trailblazer, Berlitz, AA, Time Out, BUG, etc etc.  Each of these companies is attempting to cover one or more niches in the travel demographic.  I have not used products by all of these companies, but I would like to give some opinions, both general and specific, based on my own travelling experiences.  It will be pretty obvious which companies I like/dislike, but that is in the context of all things being equal - if I have to choose between a recent publication from a "poor" company rather than a decade-old one from a "good" company, I will choose the recent one.

[Full disclosure: if you click through to Amazon from any of these links and buy the book, I will make a small percentage - though obviously it won't cost you any more.  If you don't think my information deserves that small perk, then simply open another tab, go to Amazon and search for the book title!]


Lonely Planet
I spent roughly four years travelling through India, Australia, Southeast Asia, China, Russia, South America, and Africa, seeing or meeting hundreds of other travellers in that time.  It is no exaggeration to say that 95% of the guidebooks I saw being wielded were from the Lonely Planet series.  Lonely Planet was the original mass market budget backpacker publisher.  Its accommodation and restaurant recommendations have generally been at the cheaper end of the spectrum, which is one source of its appeal.  Looking at the current Amazon Bestsellers in the Travel and Holiday Guidebook section, Lonely Planet titles account for 13 of the top 20, with the next most successful company being DK Eyewitness with just 4 titles.

I will confess that I am not a fan of the Lonely Planet series, and will only reluctantly use their books.  One reason is due to their overwhelming popularity.  Any establishment listed in the Lonely Planet will immediately become swamped with visitors, which not only means that availability can be an issue, but also that there will be a temptation on the part of the owners to lower standards and hike prices.  A second reason is that their emphasis on budget travel tends to attract, not surprisingly, young people - though I do not consider myself old as a mere cough*fortysomething*cough, I'm not particularly looking for that young a crowd to hang out with.  Thirdly, the writing style of their titles tends to be a little on the quirky side, and not - in my opinion - in a good way.  And finally, I have a slight personal grudge against them.  Other guidebook series will send you a free title if you submit a decent selection of corrections and suggestions, however the company to who I submitted the most - a laundry list of over 300 items - and received merely a tepid thank you in return was ... Lonely Planet.  They also requested that next time I wished to do something similar, I should make an individual submission for every item - which would obviously be a great use of my time for hundreds of items.

Lonely Planet does, however, score highly on maps.  Maps are one of the most useful aspects of any guidebook, simply because they can be used as a canvas on which to add information relating to any logistical parts of travel, e.g. the location of guesthouses, where buses depart from, etc.  The map for a particular town/city/site can also be ripped out of the book and taken with you as you explore, which is a lighter and less obtrusive alternative to taking the entire book (the rest of which can be left in your room).  Of all the guidebook series, Lonely Planet consistently provides the most map fodder (though see the Trailblazer section for one brilliant exception to this).

The Lonely Planet series is one of the largest out there, which means it contains some titles that cover regions not available in any other series.  This was how I came to use the Lonely Planet Africa guide, as there was no other single guidebook covering the Cairo-to-Cape route that I intended taking.  Like any multi-country guidebook (in this case ~50 countries), there's only so much space that can be given over to any one country or location, so there are bound to be glaring omissions.  It also suffered from the general Lonely Planet problems that I mention above, but it's still - 3 years on - the only pan-Africa guidebook available as far as I know, and hence it gets a recommendation from me, partly because there's no competition.

Rough Guide
I'm a big fan of the Rough Guide series, due to its combination of catering a little more for the "flashpacker" demographic than necessarily those on a shoestring budget, and what I consider to be vastly superior writing to that contained in the Lonely Planet.  It also gains points for NOT being a Lonely Planet guide, meaning that many of its recommendations not common to the Lonely Planet will not be knee-deep in dozens of other tourists.  I should also add that I have used so many Rough Guides now that there is a pleasing familiarity to their layout, so I immediately know where to go to find any particular piece of information.

My first Rough Guide usage for my round-the-world trip was in the inspiration phase, when I also had plenty of trepidation due to having never done any independent travel before.  I picked up the Rough Guide to First-Time Around The World, the Rough Guide to First-Time Asia, and the Rough Guide to First-Time Africa at various points in the run-up to departure, which together gave a high-level overview of travel-related issues, in general and in those particular continents.  Of the 3, I would recommend the First-Time Around The World title, as it briefly covers most of the common areas of the planet that RTW travellers tend to visit, plus it gives some insight into the many aspects of travel that the first-timer might not be acquainted with, e.g. visas, accessing money, daily costs, etc.  The Asia and Africa titles are worth a read for anyone who just wants an idea of what those continents can offer, but they're too high-level to be of any use to anyone actually travelling, and hence you could just as easily browse them in a bookstore before you leave.

                                         

I used 5 Rough Guides on my RTW trip, starting with the Rough Guide to India.  Since my 4 months in India took me to all corners of the country, I needed a guidebook that would cover everything (though there are guidebooks available for certain of the more popular regions such as Rajasthan).  India is notable in that each of its states has a distinctive culture, meaning the nation as a whole feels more like a couple of dozen different countries.  I should also add that I supplemented the information with much knowledge from the India Mike website, which is an amazing resource for any India-bound travellers.

I also received a great deal of inspiration from the Eyewitness India guidebook, which I will cover in the Eyewitness section.

The next Rough Guide to make its way into my sweaty mitts was the Rough Guide to Australia, which accompanied me on a total of 6 months travelling around Oz.  Australia is comfortably one of the best set-up countries in the world for backpackers, and if you travel there then you'll soon find out why - there are thousands of the b*ggers!  Misanthropy aside, the most fun I had in all my travels was during that period in Australia, due to the sheer number of people that I met.  There is so much information available everywhere about things to see and do that you could easily get by without using any guidebook at all.

     

As with India,  I was tremendously inspired by the Eyewitness Australia guidebook, which I will cover in the Eyewitness section.  I also took the BUG guide to Australia, which will be mentioned in the "Other guides" section at the end of this post.

Southeast Asia was then negotiated with a copy of the Rough Guide to Southeast Asia (though it would appear that this has now been superseded by the Rough Guide to Southeast Asia On A Budget).  Again, any book trying to cover multiple countries (in this case 11) will suffer from omissions due to lack of space but the path through Southeast Asia is fairly well worn, so there is plenty of information obtainable from accommodation and fellow travellers.

                      

I also frequently referred to a Trailblazer title carried by one of my travelling companions, but I will discuss that in the Trailblazer section.  I bought an excellent guide to Angkor when I was in Siem Reap, which I will mention in the "Other guides" section.  I should also add that Travelfish is an excellent website for travellers in Southeast Asia - the accommodation section in particular is very comprehensive.

Many Southeast Asia travellers will end up in China at some point, which is not covered in either of these books (though they do cover Macau and Hong Kong - these obviously belong to China, but they have different visa requirements to the mainland, in particular many nationalities (e.g. the British) don't need a visa to visit them).  China has some parallels with India in that it is a vast country with an enormous population, to the point where its individual provinces can more resemble separate countries, hence it needs its own guidebook.  

I picked up my copy of the Rough Guide to China in a second-hand bookshop in Hoi An in Vietnam (there are many street vendors selling guidebooks in the main cities in Vietnam, often photocopies rather than originals, and you can see that they know the market by the fact that the majority of their wares are Lonely Planets).  China was the favourite country that I visited in all of my travels, mainly because being there felt like such an adventure.  A big part of that feeling was due to not knowing any of the language, a situation exacerbated by the fact that most people don't speak any English, especially outside of the main tourist spots (i.e. Beijing/Shanghai/Xi'an).  I found the guidebook to hence be more indispensable than usual, partly due to its helpful written phrases (which I could point at rather than attempting to master any of the tonal language), and partly due to information not being as readily accessible as in neighbouring countries such as Thailand.  The downside of the guidebook was that China is changing rapidly, meaning information becomes out of date even faster than usual.  The main black mark against the book was that the Beijing section had been appallingly edited, which was totally out of character with the other sections.  However it's a definite recommendation.

 

Interestingly, when I was coming into China from Vietnam, I received a lot of hassle from a customs guy because this guide seems to be on their blacklist - it doesn't contain a section on Taiwan, which is viewed as implying that Taiwan is not a part of China!  I had to be quite firm with him that that was not the intention, as he seemed hell-bent on confiscating the book.  I didn't have this problem when entering China from Macau, but it's worth noting just in case.

On the web, China Backpacker was a useful site.

From China, I travelled via Mongolia and Russia through to Moscow, for which I used the Trailblazer Trans-Siberian Handbook, which I will cover in the Trailblazer section.

Next up on my travels was South America, for which I used the Rough Guide To South America (which appears to have been superseded by the Rough Guide to South America On A Budget).  South America has just over half the land area of Africa yet has less than a quarter of the number of countries.  And unlike most other parts of the world (especially tourist areas), where you can get by in English, you really do need to know some Spanish if you intend doing any travelling in South America.  With most of the countries on the continent speaking Spanish, you also get good bang for your buck if you learn the language, compared with (say) Southeast Asia where trying to learn some Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer, etc would be quite taxing (for Westerners, at least) and of limited applicability.

I only travelled in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia (my few hours to see the Brazilian side of Iguazu don't count), and in the main tourist destinations there was no shortage of decent information from hostels and tourist information offices.  However I was glad of the guidebook when I was slightly off the tourist trail, as sometimes there was no other source of information, or I simply could not understand the Spanish that helpful people were addressing to me!
 

                                          

Eyewitness (published by Dorling Kindersley)
The Eyewitness series of guidebooks is gorgeous but in general they are hopeless as a traveller's companion, due primarily to their emphasis on pictures at the expense of more practical information (the Top 10 city guides in the range are an exception).  Their accommodation and restaurant recommendations are generally high-end.

As pre-trip inspiration, though, they are unparalleled.  Their main selling point is the dozens of detailed, 3D drawings of sites within the particular country of interest, which no other guidebooks offer.  (This also adds to their weight - another reason you probably wouldn't choose to travel with one.)  I certainly found that the Eyewitness India and Eyewitness Australia titles got the excitement mounting in advance of my trips to those two countries.
 

                                           

Trailblazer
I've been really impressed by the couple of Trailblazer guides that I've used, though the range only consists of about 50 books, most of which are geared more towards hiking, walking, or rail travel, rather than general country information.  The first that I used (though it was a companion's, rather than my own) was the South-East Asia guide, which is sadly no longer in print.  This had the unique feature that it was based entirely around maps, of umpteen towns and cities - more than any other guidebook.  Obviously this resulted in savings having to be made elsewhere, in particular that text-based information was greatly reduced, but this was by no means a major inconvenience.  The maps would include, for example, indications of which parts of a town were best for budget accommodation, with maybe 1 or 2 specific examples max, and that general info is often as much as you need.  I don't know why this book was never updated (or why the idea wasn't expanded to other areas) - I can only assume that what struck me as being the perfect model for a guidebook didn't appeal to anyone else!  (The current price on Amazon is about £28, which is clearly excessive, but if you can pick it up in a second-hand store for a couple of quid then it would be worth checking out.)

The other title in the range that I used was the Trans-Siberian Handbook, for my journey from Beijing to Moscow, during which I stopped off in Ulan Bator in Mongolia, and Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Yekaterinburg in Russia.  I found the kilometre-by-kilometre section of the book to be fascinating, filled as it was with information about the route that could be correlated to the kilometre markers visible by the side of the track.  The guide also contains sections about each of the cities that you might stop off at en route, but these sections are, of course, nothing like as comprehensive as a dedicated guidebook (Moscow in particular has a lot more to offer than what's covered).  However the book is more aimed at conveying the joy of the train journey, and it accomplishes that aim extremely well.  It seems to be quite common for travellers to do the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Beijing without stopping - I would certainly recommend stopping off at least once, partly because Russia is a fascinating country to visit (albeit expensive), and partly because going without a shower for a week is a novelty that doesn't need to be experienced voluntarily.

  
Bradt
I don't actually own ANY of the Bradt series, but I borrowed one from another traveller and was impressed by the content.  Bradt guides are renowned for their local detail, and the range includes several books about countries for which no other guide exists - which is why I was happy to get my hands on a copy of their Sudan title (the Sudan section of the Lonely Planet Africa wasn't long).  I hadn't bothered with individual guidebooks for each country on my Cairo-to-Cape journey because of i) the weight, and ii) only intending being in each country for about 3 weeks, but this would have been the (only) one to get for Sudan.  I would have bought the Madagascar title but I was in South Africa before leaving for Madagascar, and books in South Africa cost a fortune.

Other guides
I took the BUG guide to Australia with me but it is pretty much just a list of hostels and ratings - you'll find much more recent information on the web, not to mention from other travellers, so it's not worth bothering with, especially as Internet access is readily available all over Australia.

Not so much a guidebook, more a reference work, Ancient Angkor gives an unbeatable, detailed description of the various temples in the Angkor area, including history, maps, interpretations, and numerous photos of these awesome buildings (truly a wonder of the world).  If possible, wait until you get to Cambodia before you buy it (should be less than $5 from a street vendor), then spend a few days reading it before you visit Angkor.

I have used a few other guides in the past, but they were all in the context of holidays where I went to one place and stayed in one hotel, rather than for a period of independent travel, so I won't be mentioning them here.  The thing to remember with ANY guidebook though is that it should be complementing your trip, not dictating it.