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48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pros and Cons, December 27, 2008
This review is from: Peru (Eyewitness Travel Guides) (Paperback)
I will start my review by saying I always buy the DK guides for everywhere I go. However I never just buy one guide for any trip and this is the first time I have done so and I have come to realize how lacking they are. this is not to say I will stop buying them and I will tell you why.
Pros: The pictures. Nothing beats these guides with the pictures. Trust me. when you go to Machu Pichu and someone says did you see the tres ventanas and you go "I hope so" well you won't hope so with this guide b/c this guide will show you what the tres ventanas looks like. In peru they have these HUGE churches. And each church has like dozens of these rooms of altars. but the most famous is "el negrito" maybe you are like me and just aren't into the church thing but want to see what the big deal is but don't want to miss the big must see with this guide you will make sure you won't. and in these churches you can't take pictures. so when you get back you can show your friends what you saw. brilliant.
The restaurant recommendations were excellent if a little pricey.
Cons: the maps suck. the map of lima was pretty good but there were none for any other cities. none of cusco and that is a major city! cusco is studiedly a maze, but some sort of map would have helped.
and it is short on information. it doesn't tell you how to get anywhere. I wouldn't have known to get a train from cusco to machu pichu that I couldn't take my suitcase on the train (or that i would be charged a HUGE fee to do so) how to buy tix for the bus to get up to machu pichu (which is sort of complicated) or that some places to climb in machu pichu are limited to 400 persons per day so you should arrive early (like 430 am early). This is important since this is the most major site of peru!
it didn't tell me about other ruins to see, or other cities, or give good itineraries, or how to travel around. Just that taxis were bad. Which they actually weren't.
I never realized how limited in info and scope in actually getting around these guides were when this was the only guide I took. I was lucky that I had a limited amount of spanish and people in peru were really nice and kind of directed me around told me what to see and what not to see.
bottom line: I still say to buy these books b/c I think they help you find what you are trying to see, but I also say check out the web and print out itineraries, information on how to get somewhere, or other info that you can discard so it doesn't weigh you down later! Happy Travels!
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent guide to a complex country, May 13, 2008
This review is from: Peru (Eyewitness Travel Guides) (Paperback)
It's tough to pick the "best" guidebook for a particular destination, and the proliferation of free travel information on the web makes choosing "the one" even tougher. My wife and I always start with a copy of an EyeWitness guide for the destination: there are pictures on every page, and we find the images help us plan our trip: the guides are particularly good for architecture and art. The practical guides in the back provide a useful overview of currency, hotels and restaurants.
This guide to Peru is a particularly good example of the DK offerings: the images, paper, text, all are up to the high standards of other guides in the series. We returned from our trip to Peru two days after the Eyewitness guide arrived in the mail, so that we used two other guides during our trip. Reading EyeWitness at home reinforced our belief that the Eyewitness series is the best starting point for us.
Peru is a very complicated country, and Eyewitness does a superb job of describing that complexity in words and in pictures. Its treatment of Lima was particularly good -- we were lost in the details of the city as they appeared in the two other books we used on the trip, but Lima came to life clearly in the Eyewitness guide. (We thought that Peru Insight Guide (Insight Guides) was a very good guide for the reasons indicated in my review of that guide.)
Of course, you'll need more specific and detailed guides to many of the attractions: the Inca Trail if you choose to hike it, or Machu Picchu if you visit. But for a comprehensive and visually appealing overview, Eyewitness can't be beat.
Having written that, there is really only one page that usually matters in deciding whether to buy a guide book: the newer the guide the better. This book appeared in a fully revised American edition in May, 2008. That makes this guide very hard to beat for two or three years in our experience.
Note: DK maintains an excellent website at TravelDK , with updates on many of its guidebooks.
Robert C. Ross 2008
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
First decided what you want a travel guide to do for you., May 25, 2009
This review is from: Peru (Eyewitness Travel Guides) (Paperback)
I have lived in Peru on and off since 1996 and have reviewed at least a dozen travel guides. I like DK for its layout, color or splash, but I would not get DK as a travel guide. Decided first, what you want your travel guide to do for you. If you want a guide to bring back to your friend to 'show' them where you have been via photos and country maps, then this is a great guide. But, if you need a guide that will help you find lodging, great restaurants, give you information on the country, customs & culture of the people, breakdown where to go with limited time, and explain the history of the country and the uniqueness of the sites that you will visit then get either Lonely Planet (for off the beaten path travelers) or Frommer's (for those staying on the tourist trail and want comfort). DK is recommended only for show and tell. Happy Trails.
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