Customer Reviews

Colombia (Viva Travel Guides)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book is exactly what I needed for my trip to Colombia. What I've found with VIVA is that their maps are always up-to-date, unlike some of the other travel guides I've had to deal with. Moreover, I like that these reviews are really rated by people who have traveled to the country before. These guides aren't like other guidebooks that cater to a specific demographic, like budget student travelers or the five-star-only set. I can stay in a hostel in one city and a historic landmark in another.

I've been a member of the South American Explorers for a while, and what I've found is that most of the people I meet in countries down there like to use VIVA's website just as much as I do. It's a guide put together by travelers and for travelers, and that's why I stick with them. Yet another great guide!

I just came back from a 5-week trip to Colombia. Before I left, I was told there really wasn't a good guidebook for Colombia. Checking the Amazon.com reviews, I found a litany of complaints for all the other guidebooks, and finally I settled on a brand-new edition of the VIVA Colombia which at the time didn't have any reviews. While not perfect, the VIVA guide had pretty much everything I needed. (For full disclosure, I'm a budget traveler, and I went primarily in order to improve my Spanish.)

First of all, at 505 pages, VIVA is a longer book than Lonely Planet or the other guidebooks. VIVA will devote an entire paragraph to describing a site that other books gloss over with a sentence or two. It breaks Colombia into regions and devotes a whole chapter to each one (Bogota, Valle del Cauca, Zona Cafetera, Tierra Paisa, the Pacific Coast, Upper Magdalena, Lower Magdalena, the Caribbean Coast, La Guajira, Eastern Colombia, Southern Colombia, and Llanos and Selva). Every chapter has a regional map, a map of each major city, a blurb on the history, a "When to Go" blurb, transportation information, information on local safety and traveler services, and of course a "Things to Do" section, a section on hotels and hostels, and restaurants. It is very comprehensive and easy to use.

VIVA's claim to fame, as I understand it, is that travelers' contributions to the VIVA website are compiled into the book. And VIVA claims to be "the most up-to-date" guidebook. Almost every paragraph on a new topic (be it about a restaurant or about the safety situation in a certain city) is followed by the date on which that information was last updated. And quotes from website users about various restaurants, hotels, or activities are scattered throughout the book.

I haven't had a whole lot of experience with travel guides, but here are my criticisms for whatever they're worth. First, some of the blurbs (for tour companies or Spanish schools) read like advertisement hype rather than insider info. I noticed the "Studying Spanish in Cartagena" section lists five options that actually turn out to be the same exact program under different names. I could have used more guidance on local customs and etiquette (when to tip, etc.) than was given. The city maps are pretty simplistic, but you shouldn't rely on guidebooks for city maps anyway. Just pick one up from a tourism office or the airport. Finally, the book needs a better editor (the index is too short and a couple page numbers referenced in the introductory section are actually wrong).

All in all, not perfect but certainly handy, and probably the best on the market for travelers to Colombia.

I was shocked at many errors I found in this book. The first page I read was an overall map that listed several key sites on page 12 and 13. San Agustin was somehow shown east of Bogota. It is really south west of Bogota! Way off... Parque National del Cafe was shown in the right place but the description says, "Located 160 miles north of Bogota..." It is west! This is the first map in the book and usually the first thing readers try to catch. These errors made me feel that I could not trust anything written on this book. I am going to return this now.

One good thing about this book is that this has many maps that Footprint and Bradt do not. For instance, neither Footprint (South America 2009) nor Bradt (Colombia) does not have a map of San Agustin. This book does. But I am not sure these maps are reliable.

This guidebook shares some valuable insight and general information but is lacking in important categories. I found the vast majority of maps completely useless--they lack detail and are often faulty. There is no useful country map (the map on pp 12-13 is a joke). Road maps miss important roads. The map of the old town of Cartagena (218), for instance, showed our hotel in the wrong place, and the map of Barichara (360)--one of the few usable maps--shows a train line that positively is not there. The map of Tunja shows the bus terminal one block from the main plaza (326). I was going to take a peek while changing buses--just to find out that we were two miles from the plaza. Also descriptions of how to get places are hit and miss--sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but usually so imprecise that it was impossible to get around without additional help. Hotel tips usually worked out, and some restaurant tips did too. Colombia is rich in important buildings, such as churches and plazas. Unfortunately, this guide says nothing about art and architecture and very little about the history of places. The organization leaves something to be desired as well. Why, for example, is the description for the Tayrona Park in the middle of the Taganga section even though access is really from Santa Marta? The index is a bit sloppy: a lot of places discussed in the text are not in the index, the town of Honda for example (191-2). Some fact-checking would have helped. The copy editing of this book is exceedingly poor: the organization of chapters and sections is not consistent, the user has to patch info together from various places in the book, and descriptions and level of details are very inconsistent.

The Kindle version sounded great for traveling light, but it is not worth the weight saved nor money spent. There is no table of contents nor an index, so navigating through the book is impossible. The search function is no substitute. I tried searching for "Bogota map" and nothing appeared. A search for "Bogota" does not lead directly to the chapter on Bogota, but rather to a huge list of hits, including photo credits. In other words, to simply find a chapter, you need to page through the entire book. And once you do find the chapter you are seeking, don't expect maps to be useful. The original print is too small to read. Each map can be enhanced to a preset magnification level, but then the text becomes too fuzzy to read. This could be a great resource if it was actually digitalized for use as an accessible reference book. Unfortunately it is useless in its current Kindle version.

My husband and I spent two months in Colombia using this book and I cannot think of a single time when it was actually useful to us. After the first month of our trip we referred to it as the Book of Lies and I honestly don't know why we bothered to even carry it around with us for the second month. Some of the maps in the book show cities in a different spot than where they actually are, some are missing the map key, paragraphs are repeated on the same page, information is unnecessarily repeated and inconsistent, there is no transportation information and the bus stations are never marked on the maps. Pages started falling out of our book before we even left the US.
This book looks like a middle school class project that the teacher didn't bother to edit.

I purchased the Kindle edition and once it was on my Kindle, I used Menu, GoTo...but the selection for Table of Contents was grayed out. No table of contents? How do you use a guide book on the Kindle with no TOC? Answer is you don't. Would I have to go through the book page by page setting my own bookmarks for any content that I might want to get back to in the future? Thank you Amazon for the quick refund.

The book is basically a lot of short comments from different people all cobbled together. Some of these comments can't have been properly checked out before being put into the book. For example "Uribia has the best beaches in Guajira" - Uribia is in fact not even on the coast. Whilst some parts are well researched - others really don't seem to be. Some parts seem to make constant and irrevelant mentions of "civil war situation" in a way that makes me think the author wasn't really familiar at all with the situation. Overall not great. I prefer footprint by a long way.

Thankfully my friend had another guidebook, because if we'd been stuck with VIVA and only VIVA we would have been lost and hungry. The writing sounds like a first grader, the maps are incomplete and largely inaccurate, the recommendations are out of date and wholly unimaginative, and during 2 weeks in Colombia this book did not provide even one piece of useful information. The maps are really the worst -- streets are unlabeled or, when they are labeled, they're wrong. Really important streets, intersections, and sights are missing altogether. Hotels are identified on the map in the wrong place. Having traveled all over the world and used a TON of useful guidebooks in the past, I feel quite comfortable saying this is the least helpful book I've ever purchased.

I've always appreciated the Viva! format, but the guide really does not flow seamlessly. A Rough Guides will tell you where and how to pick up traditional forms of transportation and how much it should cost, but this guide really misses these practical descriptions. Overall, I enjoy reading visitors' impressions of certain regions, but Colombia is really crying out for a more comprehensive guide.