Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Diving & Snorkeling Bahamas (Diving and Snorkeling Guides)

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

 

 

There's some good things about this book: in typical Lonely Planet style you've got great general travel information for the area (which if I really wanted, I'd buy a general travel book).

It does also cover a large number of sites - though is still far from comprehensive.

And it has some nice additional information occasionally through the book.

Two main peeves though. And they're killers:

- Each description is a paragraph, or two at most. You can't tell me very much about a dive site in so few words.

- There are no maps / diagrams for specific dive sites (just area overview maps) - a dive guide fails totally without these.

It's a pretty book, but to be any use you need to include maps and more detail per site (if this was done it could be forgiven for not being totally comprehensive).

In short, it's nice, but it's no use as a tool for researching a dive holiday.

What'S further is I now own two of these (Red Sea and Bahamas) - I certainly will not buy another.

I've just used the new dive guide by Lonely Planet on my recent dive trip to the Bahamas (Eleuthera). It was an excellent resource - solid dive site descriptions of 108 sites, which were organized by dive region. For someone not familiar with the Bahamas prior to going there, I found the book an invaluable tool for helping me plan where to go.The sidebars were entertaining to read as well (and useful), and the color photos are pretty inspiring too. Recommended highly!

Agree with the "pretty but shallow" assessment below. On a recent trip to the Abacos, found it completely useless without map coordinates. There must be a market out there for dive guides without maps or GPS coordinates (people who don't actually want to dive? the clairvoyant?) but...