Customer Reviews

Costa Rica Guide : New Authorized Edition (Central America Ser.)

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Hi, I'm Paul Glassman, the author of the original and authorized Costa Rica Guide. Though this book uses my name, it consists entirely of outdated material.

Each summer I go to Costa Rica with a group of students to do a course in Sustainable Development. As a consequence I collect Costa Rican guidebooks. The previous guide by this author was good and I looked forward to this one.

This one was a bit of a disappointment. The guide presents a good straight forward description of Costa Rica and is still a useful tool for travellers.

Where this book suffers is in the details. I first came aware of this when I was trying to use it in Monteverde and I found out that there were many errors in the map presented. I eventually learned that the map presented things as they were in arly 1997. This is a real problem for a guide published in 2000 especially since there are guides published in 1999 that have more up to date maps than this one.

The discussion of the Southern Talamanca Coast also suffers. Cahuita is discussed in greater detail than Puerto Viejo even though the latter has become the bigger tourist destination in the past 5 years. Once again, the layout of this book seems to be based on what existed in 1996-97 rather than what exists today.

Lack of detailed, useful information also haunts the ArenalVolcano/La Fortuna disussions.

In summary, Paul Glassman's Costa Rica Guide covers the basics but does not provide the type of helpful detail that many other guides provide. Normally the more recently a guide is published, the more useful it is. However in this case, there are guides published in 1999 and even 1998 that contain more useful and sometimes more up to date information than this year 2000 publication.

Hi,

I am working at Ilisa Language Instute in Costa Rica, San Jose and I want to say that this book helps us a lot to give our students helpfull information about getting around in Costa Rica. Thanks!

Hi,

I am working at Ilisa Language Instute in Costa Rica, San Jose and I want to say that this book helps us a lot to give our students helpfull information about getting around in Costa Rica. Thanks!