Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I have always been a great admirer and user of Lonely Planet guidebooks, but this time they really produced a rather poor work. On one side I can't blame them, as the region is hard to get to know, and this probably remains the best guidebook about it anyway. On the other hand, lots of data are simply wrong, for which I can see no reasonable excuse. For example, the guidebook says that there are daily flights betwen Tbilisi and Yerevan, while there have been no scheduled flights since the collapse of the USSR in 1989 ! And contrary to what is written, KLM, Northwest or Alitalia have never flown to Yerevan. The guidebook says that there are buses from Armenia to Turkey, and on the very same page it also says that it is impossible to get from Armenia to Turkey except via Georgia... Overall, there is very little this guidebook can tell you on how to get around within the region. The guidebook gives plenty of information on hotels in Tbilisi which are supposedly good, while they are now filled by refugees (surely an interesting and touching thing to see, but not where you might wish to stay). The major internet café they recommend in Tbilisi does not exist. Many addresses are simply wrong (either old or non-existent). The book makes a lot of fuss about the corruption and unclear regulations of Armenian and other border officials, which is not the case (for example in Armenia you CAN get a visa at any border for 25 $ which is valid for 3 days, and when you leave you pay 3 $ for each day you oversayed your visa) - no corruption, no problems. The book gives lots of concerns about safety and other issues which are unnecessary, and especially in its Armenia section it seems to be biasedly 'anti-local' (something one would never expect from a guidebook). Overall, it seems poorly researched and not always well written. The chapter on Nagorno-Karabakh is ridiculously short (4 pages), not to mention the one on Abkhazia (less than two pages !). Nevertheless, some information is indeed useful and sometimes even correct, and you are better off taking this guide with you to the region, rather than being without it. Just take its advice with a lot of caution, and don't take any of its data for granted.

I used the guidebook in all 3 countries within one month of its publication, and found it to be accurate for the most part. However, the authors seemed to be under orders to write glowing reports on anything considered mildly worthwhile to visit. Many of these places were not particularly noteworthy, and after awhile we took each raving description with a grain of salt. For some of the most spectacular sites (Davit Gareja and Kazbegi, both in Georgia) the book really should have included maps. The descriptions of both struck me as being second or third hand, as if the authors themselves had not taken any of the trails they described.

**Completely edited review for 3rd edition**

I'd give the new edition 4 or 5 stars, but Lonely Planet won't let me change that part of the review. It's a very solid guidebook now, packed with good information, maps, tips, and very good detail. I highly recommend it, especially for Armenia which I am most familiar with.

These 7 year old reviews for the first edition need to be removed, or associated only with that ISBN number, they are doing customers on Amazon a disservice here.

For those who want to supplement this book, "Rediscovering Armenia" is a free online wiki guide to Armenia's monuments.

I selected this book over the Elliott (AZ with Georgia) because of the superior map quality in the LP book -- a huge mistake in retrospect. The information on sights, culture, history -- all of which are so fascinating and rich for this region -- is so vapid and thin that it is hardly worth lugging around. I'd suggest anyone coming to Az (or elsewhere in the region) buy the Elliott book and augment it with photocopies of the LP maps.

It seems likely that the reason people buy this book is simply because it's Lonely Planet and because the much better travel guide options for individual countries don't seem to pop up easily when you search this site. However it's worth persevering. For Georgia the Roger Rosen book "Georgia: A Sovereign Country of the Caucasus" is good on architecture and photos, but Tim Burford's recently updated Bradt Guide is more practical. For Azerbaijan Mark Elliott's Azerbaijan with Georgia book (Trailblazer) gets great reviews (see also Amazon.co.uk) but for some reason is hidden around 75th when you search Amazon.com with the key word Azerbaijan. It has about 140 maps and loads of practical detail. For Armenia the best resource is altogether free (Rediscover Armenia Guidebook - download in sections from [website]) though you can buy the whole thing pre printed via Amazon or in situ.

Lonely Planet fumbled on this one...much of the information is out dated. The Armenia and Karabagh sections are particularly weak. There are more comprehensive books for this region with better maps and business information. Try again LP.

I tend to be a fairly big fan of Lonely Planet's style of travel guidebooks - I've used them for travels many times, simply because I like the way they're structured and enjoy all the background information that accompanies their guidebooks. Unfortunately, there are a few duds that slip through the cracks, and this one is unquestionably one of the big ones. Granted, this is a guidebook to one of the most rapidly changing areas of the world when it comes to tourism and travel, but this book doesn't even seem like it was ever in synch with the reality in the South Caucasus. The Azerbaijan section is basically satisfactory, but hardly overwhelming. Sadly, that's the best can be said, as the other two sections are very much lacking. While the Georgia one is sloppy and not at all geared towards what a traveler really needs or wants, the Armenian section is downright awful, with a glaring lack of practical information and even basic facts.

Maps go from fuzzy and confusing to completely unreliable, and restaurant listings often lack any sort of notion of prices (or are repeatedly geared for people hardly on a shoestring budget). Sometimes author recommendations are even non-existent - like the 'most recommended restaurant' in Batumi, which seems to have been bulldozed. The author for the Georgian section speaks of a gradually developing agro-tourism and homestay industry in the country, but somehow doesn't bother researching it almost at all (although you get plenty of listings for defunct Soviet hotels!). Illogically, sections on towns and other areas never include the names in Armenian and Georgian (apart from a few in an inadequate glossary in the back of the book), leaving you clueless as to what they'd be unless you spent a long time actually learning the national alphabets thoroughly. And, why throw the individual countries' history sections together into one general, regional history, especially given the unique backgrounds of each people? So much more depth could have been added to the book, but one gets the impression that the authors were racing towards a publishing deadline (especially the one for Armenia!). There's supposedly an update in the works, and it is much needed. For now though, check out instead the Trailblazer guide to Azerbaijan (*much* better coverage, even in the small section on Georgia) and the Rediscovering Armenia book, which is available either in country or on the internet - both of these actually do justice to the region.

This guide book follows the standard Lonely Planet format of providing not only information about the country, but a wide selection of accommodation and tips for the independent traveller. In my opinion, it does a fair job. The book, however, has to compare to other guide books on the same region. And there are a few very good ones around, e.g. Roger Rosen and the Bradt book on Georgia, which did better. I found the book rather thin. It is full of useful facts, but failed to convey the magic of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. A good guide makes people who do not know the country at all want to go there. This one doesn't. Perhaps it would be better to beef it up a little in the next edition rather than concentrate only on listing towns.

The guide is well packaged, and is easy to use. One won't have difficulty locating information on, say, visas, or local foods. But the book reads as if it was written by several different people who didn't review each other's notes. There's contradictory information, and much of the data for Armenia is wrong. They have the wrong telephone area code for Yerevan, Armenia, for example. They suggest trying restaurants that are in fact closed. I guess it's not bad for a first try, but I was disappointed.

There are not a lot of guides for these countries, though perhaps one guide per country would give you more detail on each, and/or be more compact. It's not clear to me that anyone going to one of these countries would probably go to all three, especially since most Westerners go for business, or to live in one of these countries in the long-term.

Nonetheless, given the paucity of travel guides for the region and the less than developed tourism industry in Georgia (the only country I have visited out of the three), the Lonely Planet guide was invaluable. Lonely Planet has a lot of problems - few photos, difficult to read black and white maps, and a lot of worthless practical information (post offices, laundromats, etc), the descriptions and histories of the sites and neighborhoods was better than anything I would have gotten within Tbilisi, in English.

Georgia is a country in transition, so certain information was a bit out of date, particularly any area in or near the conflict zones. Can't blame Lonely Planet for unexpected wars. I had the opportunity to travel quite a bit in Georgia in the course of a week or so, with Georgians. Four out of five sites were well covered in LP, with good history and descriptions.

So, if you happen to be going to Georgian and don't speak Russian or Georgian, this LP will make your trip much better.

On another note, Tbilisi is a very lovely city surrounded by high hills and a large ruined fortress looking down into the city, with some of the nicest people I have ever met. I have had problems in many cities, "Western" and developing, where people were either rude, con-artists, outright thieves, or harassing. In Tbilisi people were welcoming and honest - even the taxi drivers! And if you are American, and afterwards an EU citizen, they tend to love you because of the events in August 2008. It's just sad that such a nice city is so far off the beaten path.