Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet East Coast Australia (Regional Guide)

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This book is perfect for seeing the east coast of Australia by car, but will work just as well if traveling by bus, moped, etc. A friend and I had been planning to drive the east coast, visiting national parks and doing lots of hiking, so when I saw this book I knew it was perfect. As with all titles in the LP family, it lists many places to stay/eat based on price range, which is really nice when you are traveling on a limited budget. There are many hikes listed in the book, along with museums, oddities, and points of interest along this 'classic overland route.' My only complaint about the book is that I wish the authors had listed traveling distances between major cities at the beginning of each section, so the reader doesn't have to add up each little segment on the maps. Otherwise the book is very complete.

In recent years, I have been increasingly disappointed with the information contained in LP's guides. In the case of this one, I purposefully chose _East Coast Australia_ instead of the thicker LP guide covering all of Australia. I figured I could get more detail about locations in that region with this region-specific book, but I was wrong. Morton National Park and neighboring Bungonia Gorge are not even mentioned. (The larger guide does cover Morton.) Canberra, the nation's capitol, gets a mere 4 1/2 pages of text. Some of the smaller towns surrounding Canberra (picturesque Yass, comfortable Queanbeyan, historic Cooma, Goulburn on the motorway between Canberra and Sydney) get no mention whatsoever. Several years ago, LP discovered that there was a dearth of decent travel guides and stepped in to change the situation. Rick Steves is supplanting LP (who supplanted Let's Go Europe earlier) in Europe now. I hope someone will come along and address the rest of the world soon. In the meantime, LP's Thorntree is a great web-based interactive resource that can be taken advantage of.

My husband and I took a 18 day trip from Sydney to Cairnes, and used this book for almost all of our motels/B&B's, etc. We were looking to budget less than $100/night for rooms, and all the recommendations in this book were spot-on. The maps of towns are okay, but you'll want a full-size map to get around with and figure distances, too.

I bought this book having very little travel experience in Eastern Australia--Melbourne and Sydney notwithstanding. I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who is traveling throughout the country with only limited time in each locale. If you are planning to stay in any of the smaller cities/towns for more than 1-2 days, perhaps a more concentrated guidebook for that town would be better. For example, if you are planning on staying in the Sunshine Coast for a week, buy something specific for that area as this guidebook would not be in-depth enough.

All,

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