17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Waste of time & money, December 30, 2004
This review is from: Diving & Snorkeling Cuba (Lonely Planet Diving & Snorkeling Great Barrier Reef) (Paperback)
I agree with NM's review. This book is a complete waste of time and money. You can get more useful information talking to your local diveshop or dive travel agent. Over a third of the book gives very general tourist information that you can get from any guide to Cuba. At the back, there are the usual pages of Carribean Fish ID and some more padding.
I expected a thorough guide to most if not all, diving sites in Cuba. I have bought other books in this series (Thailand & Belize) and have found them extremely helpful and informative. This book on Cuba is severely lacking in any useful diving information.
For example under the Cayo Largo section, the author writes "Cayo Largo has around 30 sites. 3 described below...." What about the rest? The state-owned Puerto Sol diving centers around Cuba are extremely friendly & helpful and each one has a huge board with a geograpically correct map showing all the dive sites in the surrounding area. Would it be that much effort to even photograph those maps and add them to the book?
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Heavy on Photos - Short on Information., August 27, 2004
This review is from: Diving & Snorkeling Cuba (Lonely Planet Diving & Snorkeling Great Barrier Reef) (Paperback)
The first thing that struck me when a copy of this book arrived through my letterbox was how thin it was. This is a paper-back book measuring 9" x 6" (23cm x 15 cm) containing 92 pages. With 20 of those pages taken up with such information as; Title of the book (again), publisher's information, contents, acknowledgements, how to use the book, overview (history) of Cuba, geography, transportation, sightseeing, entertainment, index, etc, etc, there is precious little room left for the diving information - for which we purchased the book in the first place.
For much of the content we are then treated to one specific dive site per page each of which is headed with the following information; Typical depth range, Typical current condition, Expertise required, Access, Site No. After this we are treated to a short dialogue which, in many cases, fails to describe the site adequately and in some cases is exceedingly short. And the shorter the dialogue, the bigger the picture which takes up the rest of the page.
Of course the underwater pictures are all of typical Caribbean flora and fauna and the many species of available are almost all mentioned (somewhere!) in order to pad out the text.
In short, could have done much better!
NM
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