How to Select a Travel Guide

It was a lot easier in the old days, when there were fewer travel book choices for the more exotic destinations. You had to physically visit a bookstore , hoping they might stock ONE book that could aid your planning. Now with,dozens of travel guides, countless shelves of books, and endless online sources,  the task is reversed - how do you choose from the overflow of information. In addition, the internet provides many more options from online bookstores, to websites of the travel guides to individual blogs and websites about travel.   Here are some basic guidelines I've used in planning independent travel over the lasst 30 plus years.  My current favorite general purpose guides are Cadogans, Footprint, and the Rough Guides - these give details [in varying degrees], good historical and cultural coverage, and mostly useful maps [the popular Lonely Planet series is less useful in both these categories].

Rough Guide -- Turkey This is our favorite single guidebook series when planning our travels in Turkey. We've been to Turkey 6 times, usually escorting small groups of hikers,with varying interests in history and culture.  The Rough Guide consistently provides the best reference for both general and historical information. Combine it with  the Blue Guide --Turkey for more detailed hisotrical and architectural attractions [see below], iand t's easy to plan your trip. Your biggest problem will be deciding what to leave out.  With the usual Rough Guide stress on variety, RG - Turkey can help all sorts of travelers without sacrificing cultural and historical details. It's well organized, and has good maps (much better than the Lonely Planet series) After 6 trips to Turkey now, we still find something new from this book each time.

For in depth historical and architectural coverage, the Blue Guides are unsurpassed. Their organization takes a bit of getting used to, planned around auto tours of each country, but this small effort is repaid by detailed site plans of ruins, palaces, etc. They're great books for planning trips and incredible resources while on the trip, though they do run a bit on the heavy side

Below are some guides we've actually used and found particularly valuable:

• Blue Guide -- Egypt
• Blue Guide -- Istanbul
• Blue Guide -- South India
• Blue Guide -- Sardinia
• Blue Guide -- London Museums
• Blue Guide -- India
• Blue Guide -- Greece
• Blue Guide -- Turkey
• Blue Guide -- Venice

While all the guides we've mentioned are worth carrying for pre-trip planning, dreaming and education, I'd also recommend the Insight series. These are picture intensive, and lack the traveler information of the other series, so they're not as useful during the trip, but they're great to forecast an impression of your journey, and often useful for ideas about the photographic opportunities. Several times, a single picture in one of these books has made major differences in how we selected our itinerary, for example, we'd never heard of Palitana, but after seeing it in the Insight guide, we added 10 days in Gujarat to our India itinerary.

A comparatively newer series falls in between --  the Doring Kindersley (DK) Eyewitness Travel Guides - the white books. These DK white books are uncommonly heavy. They don't have as much detailed information as the Blue Guides or Rough Guides, described above, but the DK books are good for brief visits or first timers. Where they excel is their outstanding illustrations and diagrams, often cutaways. The maps are good, but the labeling system makes it difficult to locate things easily. Lots of full page color photos do give a preview of the trip.

Many guidebooks are also available online, so recently, I've created my own guide book by cutting & pasting from the dozens of guide books I already own [someone needs to support the guidebook companies!] and gather additional inofrmation online. The result is a customized travel packet with all the information I need for each stop we make, eliminating the need to carry many pounds of books. If you really insist on the security of books, your best bet is to use the Rough and Blue Guides, and then persuade someone else on the trip to carry the heavy DK. Even better is to buy the books you need, and then just scan the pages you need to bring with you. Another advantage of scanning and creating your own tour guide is that you can then use that same information as the basis for your travel journal - you'll have all the basic infio and details already in place, and you can then spend more time adding your unique experiences and appreciations.