I love to travel, and when I’m not traveling to exotic locations, I dream about traveling to exotic locations. Part of my planning all of my next trip is reading lots of travel books. All travel books are not created equal, so I thought I would give a little introduction to my favorites, as this might save you some time in planning your next trip.
When I first went to Europe, I relied almost exclusively upon the Rick Steves guidebooks. These books have an awful lot going for them. They will not overload you with too much information. They will guide you right to the main sites, with handy little diagrams. The trouble is, their virtue is also their flaw. By giving you a nice little concise guide, you end up having fewer choices. Also, I find my taste in dining does not match what is in the book, which tends to be slanted towards inexpensive family dining.
When I went to Paris I relied almost solely on the Rick Steves guidebook. I had to laugh, because everywhere I went I kept bumping into other people who were carrying the exact same guidebook, as they were following the exact same walking routes.
I then discovered the Dorling-Kindersley guidebooks. Unlike the Rick Steve’s books, which are basically black-and-white with extremely basic maps, the Dorling Kindersley guidebooks have intricate illustrations of both neighborhoods and buildings. These three-dimensional color drawings of the layouts give you a better overall sense of where things are.
Recently, however, I have discovered guidebooks from National Geographic, and these are now my personal favorite. Not only are they just beautiful to look at (as one would expect of course), but I find they are extremely well-balanced in terms of guiding you both to the major sites and some moreobscure and often overlooked sites. Just because it’s not famous doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go see it.
I also like the style of writing in the National Geographic travel books, because it feels more like an in-depth discussion of what is available to see, what you’ll see there, and why you should go visit it. The only real downside is, since they are printed on really heavy glossy paper, the book itself weighs a fair amount, but I think that’s a reasonable trade-off. One can always buy a used copy and cut out the pages you are going to use on your trip.
I recently discovered another travel book put out by “Magic of Italy.” What’s interesting about this book is that it deals with sites that are not terribly famous. Unlike the big sites which are always crawling with tourists, these are “undiscovered” sites that are well off the beaten path but well worth seeing. One of these days, I’m going to go to Italy and rent a car and explore some of these little gems they describe in the book. The photography is excellent.
Every guidebook has useful information, Lonely Planet and Frommer’s and just to name a few, but I find I am spoiled by the guidebooks that are heavily illustrated, as this gives me a much better idea of how I’m going to get somewhere and what I’m going to see when I get there. Also a lot of the information in these guidebooks, in the age of the Internet, seems rather extraneous. I do all of my research for restaurants and hotels on tripadvisor.com. Online reviews are of course notoriously uneven, because people who have complaints are much more likely to write scathing reviews than people who had a good experience. But overall, I find tripadvisor.com to be very useful in researching dining and accommodations, especially since any hotel that is recommended by Rick Steves is booked up at least a year in advance, making all of his hotel recommendations useless to a spontaneous last-minute traveler like me.
(a pic of me in rio de janeiro, with the ballet dancers of the theatro municipal :-)
My next major trip will probably be to Naples and the Amalfi Coast, although there’s a chance of visiting Germany and maybe South Africa . . .
Stay tuned . . .
© Justin Locke
