Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Colombia (Country Guide)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I just returned from a 2 week trip to Colombia. We stayed one week in the mountain town of Pasto, where my Ecuadorian wife has friends, and one week in Cartagena. The section on Pasto was OK. But the section on Cartagena was terrible. The hotels mentioned were mostly limited to cheap backpacker places in Getsemani, the worst part of town. I have stayed in many $5 places myself. But my wife, like most Latinas, knows that super cheap hotels often double as brothels or "love motels" in Latin America and refuses to stay at them. They also don't mention any hotels in Bocagrande, where most Colombians on vacation stay. I understand that Lonely Planet caters mostly to foreign tourists on a tight budget. But LP also offers the only current guidebook to Colombia and needs to cover a much broader price range in order to be of use to all types of travellers.The restaurant info was also very limited and of little use.

Furthermore, the 2006 edition offers practically nothing new in its "update" to the 2003 edition. A waste of money!

This is a very poor Lonely Planet book. I think the reason is that Colombia is still considered dangerous, though for the tourists it is not, and LP authors don't go to dangerous places. The example of that would be Haiti - no guidebook, no update in the new Caribbean guidebook, due to "unstability". Well Rough Guide Authors didn't have a problem with visiting Haiti and french Petit Fute has a recently updated book all about the island. And it isn't dangerous. Lonely Planet just chickend out. I think we have the same problem here. After Mr. Dydynski, noone s just brave enough at LP to visit "risky destinations". The question is, why write a guidebook like this at all.

Anyway, I've visited Barranquilla and Cartagena with this book. The part about Cartagena was OK, though the choice of restaurants was limited and I'm not sure they chose the best ones. The chapter on Barranquilla was laughable. I know it's not really a pretty tourist town, but people do visit it (and not only for the carnival), so LP authors should really write a bit more pages about it. It's a large city and got the amount of info as small towns do in other LP guides.

Well, to sum it up. Colombia is a very interesting country of over 40 million inhabitants and numerous atractions... now look at the number of pages in the book - small countries get 2-3 times fater LP guides... well, case closed - it can't be good!

I have been using lonely planet guide books all over the world for over 20 years. This is a poor effort by lonely Planet and the authors. Very limited information for a country full of incredible people and places.

This guide does little more than repeat SOME of what the previous guide did. Most likely the writer just checked out phone numbers, maybe eliminated those that did not respond. Many of the best sights, hotels, restaurants, etc. in Colombia are omitted, which will lead a traveller to skip cities altogether that should not be missed! When willl someone publish a truly useful Colombia guide???

If you're wondering why this guidebook gets such low marks from its users, there's a reason. One of its main contributors has confessed that he's never been to Colombia; nevertheless, the Lonely Planet still stands behind the guidebook as being "accurate." Here's a news clipping about it:

Lonely Planet rocked by author fraud

Popular guide book giant Lonely Planet has suffered a severe blow to its credibility, with one of its authors admitting to plagiarising and making up huge slabs of his books.

Thomas Kohnstamm, who worked on more than a dozen guide books for the publisher, has even admitted that he didn't visit one of the countries he wrote about, saying he worked on the book about Columbia from his US home.

"They didn't pay me enough to go (to) Columbia," News Ltd newspapers reported him as saying.

"I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

"They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do."

He also claimed to have accepted free travel, breaking the publisher's policy aimed at maintaining the independence of its authors.

Mr Kohnstamm's confession is a severe blow to Lonely Planet, considered a bible to travellers all over the world.

More than six million of its country guides are sold each year.

Lonely Planet has conducted a review of all Mr Kohnstamm's guide books, but says it has failed to find any inaccuracies in them.

I have just returned from Colombia (December 2006), using solely the Lonely Planet guide for 3 1/2 weeks. I followed the Essential Colombia itinerary, which the book states will take 5+ weeks, in 3 weeks fairly comfortably. I started in Ipiales, worked my way up to Cartegena and back down to Bogota. There were the usually small errors, but by the time I reached Mompos, I wondered if the authors had visited Colombia recently. Permit me to describe some of the errors in just Mompos.

Mompos is reached by an 8-hour bus ride from Categena. The book describes that you may also reach Mompos more quickly by boat, and also leave upsteam by boat to El Banco. I checked with several locals in both Mompos and El Banco who stated there were no boats going to/from Mompos. I also did not see any boats along the river during my stay there. The book states that you can take a colectivo from Calle 18 (near the markets) at Plaza de Bolivar. Well, the colectivos moved from this location over two years ago. The local market moved 3 years ago. In sum, the material on getting and leaving town was dead wrong. Then there was the little stuff. The town can be walked easily, you don't need a bike. I couldn't find the bars listed in the book. I am a little surprised this was published in its present form. Senderos Felices!

I earlier wrote a review of Lonely Planet's Guatemala where I reported indications the author had a conflict of interest. LP refused to answer any questions about this. The only thing they did was to prohibit my posting on their web site. Now the Daily Telegraph has published an article exposing further fraud. Kohnstamm, one of the authors of this guide said he never even went to Colombia. He said he wrote it in San Francisco with help from an intern at the Colombian embassy who he was dating. If Amazon wants to show any integrity in all this it should stop selling all known afflicted LP Guides until they can be vetted for accuracy by a reliable source. Obviously not an LP editor.

I was pretty dissatisfied with the book. I am the type of person who usually ignores bad reviews and buys things that I want... and I am usually glad that I did. However in this case, I did not pay attention to the bad reviews because this is basically the only Colombia guidebook available... and I have not even used it once. I am here in Cali for 2 months, and the small amount of info that was in the book I had already easily obtained from 2 minutes on Google. In my opinion the maps are incomplete, the recommendations are narrow, and the overall meat of the book is cut VERY LEAN. Try the free "poor but happy" Colombia guide on the internet.

Dont buy this guide. It's a waste of money. Its totally incomplete. There is no information about the Pacific Coast or La Guajira.
The information about lodging in Medellin is poor. Just have a look at Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Forum and you will find more critics aboud the guide

I have been a lonely planet guide book fan for many years. Unfortunately, this one is a big disappointment. I doubt the writer spent much time in the country. The info on Medellin is practically non existent. If they even bothered to read wikipedia, they could have provided 100x more info.