Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Bali & Lombok (Lonely Planet Bali and Lombok)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a good guidebook and fairly accurate. In a country like Indonesia, however, things change quickly so use this book as a reference not as a bible. Do you own research and talk to other travellers. Since the LP Bali is the default travellers' guide to this region, most of the restaurants and hotels covered are not the best values. Many get a steady stream of customers just because of a good review and never bother to maintain the facilities. The best deals require a lot of footwork and bargaining! Learning some bahasa indonesia always helps. The language section is adequate but the phrasebook is much better.

Nightlife is making a big comeback with the reopening of Paddy's Reloaded (did they really need the weapons terminology?) and the return of the young aussie crowd. Check Bounty for the college age crowd, Seminyak for the posh/club crowd.

You can also avoid the moneychangers altogether by going to the BCA ATMs. Look for the ones that give you bills in 100,000 Rp denominations. You get a more reasonable maximum with these machines.

The activities sections are good, particularly the surfing one. They do a poor job of covering Lombok however, if you are planning on heading out there for an extended stay, I would recommend the LP Indonesia. Be forewarned though, the constant soliciting outside of the Gili Islands in Lombok is extremely tiresome. For scuba, skip Gili altogether and head to Flores or Sulawesi (or even back to Bali's Menjangen). Many of the sections are blasted out and the whole place is overfished.

Finally, if you want to book a boat trip to the Komodo Islands, you have a couple options, the pricey Perama boats (better and more luxurious boats) or the cheapo independent boats (very basic converted fishing boats). The second option is very very basic - you sleep on dirty mats and the snorkeling equipment doesn't work. The food is pretty good though and you do get to all the major sites with no hassle. If you don't mind all this, you can book these boats pretty much anywhere on Lombok. The dragons are all worth it - we saw a couple fighting over a mate.

We spent three weeks in Bali using this book as a guide. For overviews of different parts of the island, we found it very helpful, and we relied on the maps to sort of get our bearings. However, I suspect we could have gotten those things from any travel guide. The Lonely Planet book in specific was recommended to us by our travel agent, and because of the witty and intelligent writing, we thought it would be well-researched and trustworthy.

Not so! We were very disappointed with a lot of places reviewed well by the authors of this book. We stayed in the hotel marked "our pick" in Seminyak and it was much more expensive, we couldn't get hot water, and we got eaten alive by mosquitos. It recommends an "art market" in Ubud that is probably worse for rabid hawkers than Jalan Legian in Kuta. It hugely understates the presence and tenacity of hawkers and touts. The authors seem unaware of Bali Belly, traveler's sickness, Montezuma's Revenge, whatever you want to call it, and there's no advice on avoiding that. It neglects to mention anything that I could find about women being barred from temples during "that time of the month" or where sarongs and sashes are required and how they're supposed to be worn.

I don't think this book works as a stand alone guide. It paints a picture of Bali as the nicest place on earth, full of charming this and breathtaking that. We followed its advice and found a version of the island overrun by tourists, rife with scam artists, with culture and history pushed aside by Bintang t-shirts and anything else that could generate a quick buck. We also found amazing places and wonderful people, but only once when we put down this misleading book and started trusting our instincts.

I'm just back from Bali and took three guidebooks. The Lonely Planet guide was far and away the best. It was funny and in the best guidebook tradtion, it did a great job of stearing me away from popular places like Gunung Agung and Besakih Temple - which are two of the worst tourist traps on the island. The author seems to have actually spent time posing as a tourist in these places to uncover all the scams. The rest of the book does a good job of finding all the new places to go for dinner and drinks in hot places like Seminyak. Make this your only Bali guidebook.

I am Balinese and live in Ubud.

As I am involved in tourism, I always keep a close eye on guide books to make sure that they do not give any incorrect information, either generally in respect of Bali, or in particular, in respect of my own restaurant, shops and accommodation in Ubud.

I am pleased to say that the text is remarkably accurate - as are the maps - which is not easy in the fast changing world we now live in.

The sections on Balinese culture are concise and very helpful to those visiting the island for the first time. Balinese culture is complicated and the visitor will benefit greatly from the explanations in this book.

There are also some nice photographs. Recommended.

I bought this book when I revisited Bali with my wife. I was last there some 15 years ago using a different guide book. I bought and used this book to explore a few off the beaten track places I didn't see the last time. I find the recommendations on food and lodging excellent. The standard Lonely Planet layout makes it easy to find the info you need. This rewritten edition is not just informative but full of its own unique flavour as well.

Not being a trekker, my wife found the info on restaurants and shopping to be very useful too.

I bought this along with the Lonely Planet Indonesia book...and well, this book didn't have much additional information than what was covered in the Indonesia book. Some sections were actually taken verbatim. Compared to other Lonely Planet books, I actually found the general Indonesia book to be quite detailed, so I think you should be fine without this supplement.

A review of a travel guide necessarily reflects the needs and attitudes of the author. In the interest of full disclosure, my background (as cogent to this review): I have done a great deal of budget travel over the past 25 years, focusing on cultural and natural attractions, particularly in Asia, much targeted to develop my knowledge and understanding as a world history teacher. I did a year's sabbatical traveling throughout Southeast Asia in the late 90's using Lonely Planet guides, and they were wonderful resources both in terms of providing basic background on the places I was visiting (history, culture, etc.) AND highly useful guidance on traveling there. I've heard that Lonely Planet was sold to another entity; whether or not that's the reason, I have to say that as I am traveling in Bali I am finding this guide to be not only of little use, and targeted to a different type of traveler (i.e., one with a ton of money and interested mostly in the "extractive" aspects of travel), but in many ways actually offensive. To make that final point, and then to leave it because you're probably much more interested in the guide's usefulness or lack thereof, an illustrative quote: "Denpasar...is a vibrant place...even as it threatens to absorb the tourist hubs of Seminyak, Kuta and Sanur." (If you don't get why I chose that quote, you probably won't agree with my review in general.) On the usefulness front: things like restaurants and hotels used to be separated into "budget", "mid-range" and "high-end." Not like I can't separate them on my own, but the fact is there's almost nothing listed that would fit into that first category, and the "Top Choices" (a new feature) are almost always glitzy tourist-oriented places. There are a few statements here and there that give you some guidance on how to find things that are a bit more, shall we say, "authentic", but they're few and far between. (Where they do exist, they're useful.) Clearly, the target audience has changed, and for someone like me (and likely you, if you're a similar type of traveler), this is NOT the guide of choice, or even A guide of choice -- frankly, it's a waste of money. A final illustration: the sections about history, culture, etc. are tucked away in the back of the book rather than being in the front as they used to be in all the Lonely Planet guides I used. Again, I think that's a clear reflection of the change in emphasis in the book -- away from a respectful attitude towards, and one of deep interest in, the culture/society being visited and towards one of exploitation. I find that sad. As a teacher and an avid (and, I hope, responsible and culturally sensitive) traveler, I miss the old guides! Sigh...

This book will help you find your way around. No problem. The maps were very good. I would have appreciated more restaurant and shopping reviews:ie.. What to look for in the way of bargains found only in Bali, how to tell if you are being ripped off, that kind of help. On that matter, you can tell it was written by a man. In fact this book felt more man friendly than woman friendly. I too, like the above reader, live in Asia. I take my family when I travel. Lonely Planet doesn't cater to my "crowd". I wanted to be told to avoid specific locations or tourist traps and to be told not to miss other places, and I felt sorta let down. I think the author could have given better information on hotels. For instance I found our hotel on line. The book didn't help at all there. For more family oriented guides I usually go with Frommer's (wish I would have had it on this trip). If you venture anywhere in Asia, you must do your homework and that means Internet, and generally more than one guide book. I would recommend this as a companion guide. We liked Bali so much we are going again in 6 months.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Bali in 2003, it was so worth the jetlag and my LP was extremely helpful. I was lucky to stay with my friend at his home in Kerambitan during part of the trip and recommend visitors to try and go off the beaten path away from tourist centers if possible. I was traveling with a friend and since we are both students we were really interested in seeing sights and performances more than surfing and snorkeling. We managed to make it over a lot of the island including Lake Bratan, Lake Batur, Besakih, etc. etc. This book was helpful for navigating our guides and drivers to the places we were interested in seeing, as well as knowing exactly where we were heading. The cultural information is really good and really important to read before you go since Balinese culture is not only very interesting, but also really complex. Just be wary of being hassled by guides at Besakih, especially if you don't want one. But this book gives the ins and outs really well. I really prefer LP over other travel guides.

I spent almost a month in Bali, carrying and using this guidebook. It focuses on places to stay, major attractions and places to eat with a slant toward western-style comfort. It has reasonable, if brief, descriptions of the art, culture and religion of Bali. And like any guidebook, it is best used as a starting point. If you aren't willing, for example, to walk around Ubud or Lovina and see what's there, you are going to miss a lot, guidebook or no.

The introduction to Balinese culture, religion and art, descriptions of major temple sites, places to stay and eat were all helpful and generally accurate, if brief. We successfully used the guidebook to plan wandering itineraries throughout central and northern Bali.

My one criticism of this book? Like most, it doesn't really offer a clear description of the author's point of view. Knowing how the author travels (backpack, three big suitcases?) his or her preferences about food and lodging (five star or food stall preferred?) and approach to historical/cultural sites (linger for days or knock them off the to-do list) makes books like this more useful for me.

As for the reviewers that complain that the guidebook didn't "warn" them of bali belly or the persistence of hawkers and taxi drivers... these are such common features of "third world" travel that they hardly seem worth spending many paragraphs of guidebook print. In the same sense, depending on a single guidebook without doing other reading about a country's language, culture, way of life almost guarantees one will have a difficult experience, especially when the culture is as different from our everyday western world as Bali is.

Overall, if you aren't a Fodors-kind-of-traveller and are just going to buy one guide, I would make it this one.