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tanyarobinson's review
3.0
I only wish Rick Steves did travel books for Australia.
I used Lonely Planet Australia as a guide for my recent trip down under, and overall I was disappointed. While it was helpful in deciding what I wanted to see beforehand, I could have found all that information online (on tripadvisor.com, for example). For me the most important function of travel books is to be my on-site tour guide. This book didn't have enough information on any individual place to be worth carrying along. Of the 14 days of my visit, I only packed it in my purse for 2 of them, and even then I didn't find it of much use. I am accustomed to Rick Steves' wonderful tips -- things like "buy your tickets at this little shop and avoid the line" and "if you go to the very back of the market you'll find this fascinating statue" and so forth. There was none of that here. I also found the few suggested itineraries to be very slow-moving and incomplete. But maybe my type of traveller is not the target audience for Lonely Planet.
The main source of the problem is that this book covers all of Australia in depth. Even though I flew all over the continent, visiting Sydney, Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef, and the central Outback, I only used a small fraction of the guide's content. Any book trying to cover so many sites is limited on what details it can include, but the compromises made to keep the page number reasonable didn't work for me.
Another big complaint -- the index was terrible and never had an entry for anything I tried to look up! So I'd find myself paging through 30 pages on Melbourne, for example, trying to find the one paragraph that talked about Birrarung Marr. It was very frustrating.
Barely 3 stars, because I'm recognizing it has a lot of content I didn't use that probably added value. I wish I had just bought several smaller books on the cities I was visiting.
I used Lonely Planet Australia as a guide for my recent trip down under, and overall I was disappointed. While it was helpful in deciding what I wanted to see beforehand, I could have found all that information online (on tripadvisor.com, for example). For me the most important function of travel books is to be my on-site tour guide. This book didn't have enough information on any individual place to be worth carrying along. Of the 14 days of my visit, I only packed it in my purse for 2 of them, and even then I didn't find it of much use. I am accustomed to Rick Steves' wonderful tips -- things like "buy your tickets at this little shop and avoid the line" and "if you go to the very back of the market you'll find this fascinating statue" and so forth. There was none of that here. I also found the few suggested itineraries to be very slow-moving and incomplete. But maybe my type of traveller is not the target audience for Lonely Planet.
The main source of the problem is that this book covers all of Australia in depth. Even though I flew all over the continent, visiting Sydney, Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef, and the central Outback, I only used a small fraction of the guide's content. Any book trying to cover so many sites is limited on what details it can include, but the compromises made to keep the page number reasonable didn't work for me.
Another big complaint -- the index was terrible and never had an entry for anything I tried to look up! So I'd find myself paging through 30 pages on Melbourne, for example, trying to find the one paragraph that talked about Birrarung Marr. It was very frustrating.
Barely 3 stars, because I'm recognizing it has a lot of content I didn't use that probably added value. I wish I had just bought several smaller books on the cities I was visiting.
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