Lonely Planet China | Damian Harper, Andrew Burke, ... | Fine, No Problem, What More Could You Want?

Lonely Planet China | Damian Harper, Andrew Burke, ... | Lonely Planet - CHINA

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Lonely Planet China

	Lonely Planet China Damian Harper, Andrew Burke, ... Lonely Planet Publications, 2007 - 1028 pages average customer review:based on 90 reviews view larger image
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Fine, No Problem, What More Could You Want?

I spent over over two months traveling around China and this is the book that I took with me. Besides the fact that the map at the front isn't very good and that in a couple of remote places (the North Korean border town of Dandong, for example) the street maps weren't entirely accurate (a problem in China given that local people usually don't even know the name of the street on which they work) I found this to be a great book. Really. It was fine. It did the trick. No problems. I subjected it to quite a lot of wear and tear and it's still togther and looking good. I cannot, for the life of me, understand some of the negative reviews here.

One says there's no Chinese in the book. I'm looking at the Chinese in the book right now. In addition to place names, food items, and so on and so forth, there's an entire section of it for pity's sake (although, to be fair, it has been cleverly disguised as "Languages"). Another critic claims that the volume doesn't contain any useful travel information, a kind of miracle when you consider that it's nearly a 1000 pages long and positively teeming with the sections 'Sights,' 'Sleeping,' 'Getting There and Away,' 'Getting Around,' 'To and from the airport,' 'Maps,' etc.

Despite the LP formula, quality can vary from writer to writer and book to book and some writers are bent on plugging the hum drum (lest the potential buyer think the country is rubbish and return the book to its spot on the shelf), but not in this case. Perhaps there are a few minor glitches here and there but in a tome of this size there are bound to be. Basically, you arrive at a place, check into a recommended hotel, take a look at the 'Sights' section and off you go. Book your onward ticket from your hotel's in-house travel agency, which is easy to find as it's usually the same counter or the one next to your hotel's in-house "massage center."

One more thing: if you are using this guide book in China, you may want to consider tearing out the map in the front. I ran into three people who had their Lonely Planets confiscated by officials because it didn't include Taiwan. Each person was given a little geography lesson before having their (rather expensive) book taken away from them ("Do you see this troublesome little island here? The one with more than a thousand missiles aimed at it? To whom does it belong?"). The reason why this can be problematic is that you rarely see English travel guides (even second hand ones) in China, except for major cities like Shanghai and Beijing. I ran into a nice Danish couple who had their Lonely Planet taken away and hence they had to waste valuable time searching around for a new one. It was their first time to China and they hadn't the faintest idea as to where or what Taiwan was. But, of course, they do now. No matter which book you decide on, enjoy your travels in China. It's certainly a fascinating place.

Troy Parfitt, author

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Lonely Planet - CHINA

Physical condition - Bent cover and first pages - ACCEPTABLE
Contents - We plan a trip to China in November 2007. This
Guide will be an invaluable resource - even though we will
be on a guided tour. We have guests that have lived years in
China and when they saw our copy of "Lonely Planet - CHINA",
they said that "It is absolutely THE BEST."

Best guide book for China

I spent a month in China with this guide book. The city maps were not great, but they were the best maps I found in any guide book. When I got back from my trip, someone gave me a hilarious new novel that takes place in China -"Sweet and Sour July"- about a group of tourists making their way from Hong Kong to Beijing and seeing everything in between. I highly recommend both of these books if you are planning a trip to China.

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Use With Caution!

It is confusing that many of the reviews here are for the National Geographic Traveler China book, by the same author as the Lonely Planet book. The National Geographic book has lots of pictures and is a good "idea" book. The Lonely Planet is geared to the independent traveler, with much more specific information about how to get around. This review is for the Lonely Planet.

My husband and I have successfully used Lonely Planet books on many other trips, but we were disappointed in the China book. Obviously China is a huge country, and it is changing very quickly, so we were not surprised to find that many places no longer exist and that some of the information was out-of-date. But we WERE surprised at the amount of blatantly wrong information. For example, the section on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang was so mixed-up that we ended up spending the day at the wrong hiking area.

In most countries it would be fairly easy to double-check the accuracy of a description by asking a hotel concierge or taxi driver. In China, though, we often had problems communicating, so we relied much more heavily on our guidebooks.

The book is huge, but it didn't need to be quite so big. Many of the descriptions are excessively wordy, and sometimes it seemed like the author was more interested in writing a clever review than clearly giving the facts.

The best thing about the book is that names of places and most streets are written in Chinese. It was incredibly helpful to be able to point to the place we wanted to go. We found that our accents and pronunciations were so bad when we tried to read pinyin that most people didn't even realize we were trying to speak Chinese to them.

We looked through other guidebooks at some of our guest houses, and unfortunately none seemed to be much better.

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