Customer Reviews

Footprint Argentina, Third Edition

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There was a day when Rough Guide and Lonely Planet were the best guides for travelers that sought to leave the tour groups behind and explore on their own. But slowly, year by year, Footprint has improved, and now this 4th edition is one of the best guides for Argentina that you can buy. *Note that this review is for the the 4th edition, other reviews below are probably refering to the 3rd Edition.

I took five travel guides with me to explore Argentina/Patagonia, and I found myself consistently reaching for Footprint first. It is the most current (2006) and the guide consistently listed quality accommodations and good restaurants, some of which were exemplary. The city maps in the guide are excellent. All the restaurants and hotels are well marked on each map. Kudos.

Footprint Argentina's background section (history, religion, culture etc.) is well written, brief, yet informative. There is an abundance of website references throughout the text and a website listing for almost every accommodation = excellent.

I spent five weeks exploring Patagonia and found Footprint to be the best single guide to have. More than 200 pages in this Argentinean guide are devoted to this region, including a section on Chilean Patagonia. If you purchase "Time Out Patagonia" (see my review) you will have the best two guides possible for Patagonia.

On the downside Footprint uses a cumbersome letter system instead of just telling you the price for accommodations (i.e., LL=$200 plus, L=$150-$200, AL=$101-$150, A,B,C,D,E,F etc. -- putting the legend at the back of the book - a serious hassle). It also fails to tell you what is the price range for the restaurants; so at one eatery you could pay $10 for your meal, then have a $35 bill at another. Not good. The descriptions of the restaurants are insipid and verge on being meaningless: "tasty food", "cosy", "very popular", "delicious food". Whereas, other good guides (Rough Guide - also highly recommended - see my review) give you pointers: "best grilled shrimp ever" / "the steaks here are the best in town" etc.

Bottom line: this is a very good guide for Argentina and the best guide for those that are going to Patagonia. Highly recommended

There are some better books about Argentina... in Spanish an in six volumes. The best single-volume that I've seen for a traveller is here: the Footprint series at last got it right! (I speak about this last edition only). A lot of good sites that I know from my wanderings in my home country are here, and some others... too! Read carrefully the guide, if you found one sentence that says: this place is breathtaking, believe it even if is only mentioned in that sentence: Argentina is a VERY big place, so many of his attractions may be shortly described, because of that you must put attention to the words that are used. Enjoy!! (and believe the book about security concerns, the guide recomends to visit the country and I agree, the places where it says that you must take care are exactly the places where you must do it).
Update 2008: more info about the unknown province of Catamarca would be welcomed: it have the highest volcanoes out there, natural thermal baths in front of the Andes, and it is really out of the beaten path.

very impressed by the depth of intelligent coverage on history/economics and politics as an added bonus to the extremly helpful maps and local information. Loved the lay-out. The suggestions of HOW a trek to one city could naturally lead to a visit to another... very fluid. Very well done. I have never bought a footprint book before... i think this will be my first of many. A cut above the rest! Even my argentine boyfriend agrees!!

I travelled to Argentina in Nov 2004 so I bought this guide given that it was a brand new edition (the book was published Jan 2004 and the date of the editing was Nov 2003). Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed. The authors clearly have a very good knowledge of the country & its sites, and the guide provides a wealth of information that can help you see & enjoy the places of interest. The attractions are nicely presented both in the info pages and on the maps making it pretty easy to put together walking tours etc. However it seems that this last edition was tossed together a bit hastily. There are numerous editing mistakes. Phrases or words that are repeated, references to wrong pages etc. In addition a lot of the information is not up-to-date. For instance a "highly recommended" restaurant in El Calafate is now closed. A bar (one of the four) in Ushuaia is closed too. Of course your trip doesn't depend on a restaurant or bar, but this is indicative that the authors haven't visited these locations in a while. I found similar discrepancies in Buenos Aires. The Museum della Polizia Federal has been closed "for more than a year". Also closed (at least on Saturdays) is the museum della Revolucion. The tour of the Recoleta Cemetry is not Sunday at 14:30 but Sat & Sun at 11:00 & 16:00, and there IS an English tour on some other day/time. In these cases the outdated info resulted in my missing these sites. Prices are also outdated. All prices are in US Dollars (why?) and given the fluctuation of the dollar some change was expected. However some were off by 50-60%. Another problem is that the maps are a bit mediocre. There is only a tiny Buenos Aires map, then detailed maps of some neighborhoods that are close to impossible to combine together. There is no reverse index for the items on the map and some of them don't even appear on the info section. I personally ended up using a street map that I got at a gas station. To sum up, Footprint clearly hasn't double-checked their content so for every practical purpose you should expect to find info dated as of the previous edition. This doesn't render the guide useless - on the contrary the well-presented content will be extremely helpful - but you should take things with a grain of salt and double check dates/times/prices/etc

Everything about this book, from phone numbers to accommodation reviews, has been almost laughably wrong. I've never felt compelled to write a review on amazon before, but this book has been so inaccurate I think I should warn people. The only reason anyone should buy this book is to do the exact OPPOSITE of whatever it says. I doubt this author has even been to the places she writes about, that's how consistently wrong this book is. It is impossible to locate a copyright date, and they probably did that on purpose, considering many places have closed and info is obviously outdated. I understand that some places change over time, but I've given this book a chance in 10 different places throughout Argentina and the advice here has failed miserably.

We travelled around Argentina out of season using this guide and the Rough Guide, and found that we turned time and again to the Footprint Guide for reliable and up-to-date information. I broke my ankle in Salta, but thanks to this guide, we were booked into a fantastic hotel, and later spent a few nights luxuriating in a gorgeous and fantastic value for money estancia in Pumamarca, which went some way towards saving the holiday from disaster. If you're thinking of going to Argentina, go now, and take this guide with you!

The authors have attempted to add a great deal of new material, sidesprings of interest, and helpful hints that expressly helps the first time traveler to assess the place...its virtues, highlighs,drawbacks, etc. My only complaint...for which I markdown to 4 stars...is that for aging eyes and/or less than perfect vision readers, the text print is way too small, and the maps extremely difficult to read. I suppose that was done to conserve space, but I think mistakenly. When you are straining to read, attention is sure to wander away,and for a great guide book, the reader has to be kept focused.

We travelled to Argentina recently and used this as our only guide. The information was accurate, well presented and current. My wife particularly enjoyed the writer's excellent and as she herself said, elegant descriptive prose. We had a marvellous time on the strength of some of her recommendations, most particularly the Lake district and Mendoza where we ate enough meat to see us both through to our pensions. Many thanks Ms Dilks!

I returned from Argentina just two weeks ago, and I used this book exclusively. I usually use the "Let's Go" guides when I travel, and I didn't like this one nearly as much. Too many superlatives throughout the book - unfortunately not everything can be amazing or fantastic - so after a while there was really no way to differenciate the truly fantastic (the falls or Perito Moreno Glacier), from the just so so things. And regardless of what the book says, unless you love to eat beef and pork every meal, the food is terrible. Very mediocre pasta and pizzas everywhere, and vegetarians are highly restricted. The food was definitely the lowlight of our trip. If interested in hiking and the outdoors - plan on spending the majority of your time way down south. El Calafate, El Chalten, and Ushuaia are all truly amazing areas. And if you can fit the Falls in, they are definitely worth the trip. The prices in the book were pretty accurate, although things tended to be a bit higher. But it is still quite inexpensive. We thought the book did a poor job of letting you know just how difficult it would be to get to many of the wilderness areas without your own car or hiring an expensive guide. Another thing to remember when planning your trip is that it is much cheaper in the North, and the buses are nicer and more plentiful. Overall, I thought it was a good book, but the authors could have been a bit more honest about the shortcomings of the country.

I found this to be an excellent guidebook. Argentina is a massive country and this guide manages to be both useful and accurate about very large portions of it. The author has clearly travelled to all these places herself and is very good on the kind of detail one can only garner from personal experience. It is far more reliable than any other comparable guidebook. A fine addition to the Footprint range - which we have used all over the world and found to be uniformly excellent.