Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Rajasthan, Delhi & Agra (Regional Guide)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book offers everything you expect from a Lonely Planet travel guide - background infos you need to know about the country (Do's, Don'ts, how to get by in India on your own, etc.), sights, restaurant and hotel listings and much more for your trip to Rajasthan.
Like most Lonely Planets, it is a bit thin on history and culture, the description of the sights is sometimes very short.
The Delhi chapter is extensive, though.
You get everything you expect from a LP, but if you are interested in history and Indian culture and religion, buy another book to accompany this LP on your trip.

This particular version of the Lonely Planet Guide Book for Rajasthan, Delhi, and Agra (in India) is adequate. But the similar Rough Guide for the same region is better, having more detailed descriptions and being more visually appealing due to its greater use of color. For instance, the Lonely Planet book has less than 2 pages about Akbar's capital city of Fatehpur Sikri while the Rough Guide book has 8 pages.

If you're doing the 'typical' first time trip to India - the Golden Triangle - this is all you need - no reason to have a full guide to India since the south is completely different from the north - carrying a full guide to India if you're just going to Delhi, The Taj Mahal, and say Jaipur, is like carrying a guide to to Poland for a trip to France - I guess that's why Lonely Planet decided to publish this concise guide.
Traveling to India takes a lot of preparation and you discover you forgot to do half the preparation you needed when you get there - this book helps full the gaps, prepare you for the shocks, gives great connection information to the often confusing and chaotic, but surprisingly pretty well ran Indian railways.

It also gives you good thumbnail estimates about prices -which is essential for Western travelers as you are continuously the target of price gouging. Highly recommended.

nother reliable guide by the folks at Lonely Planet.
The Delhi guide provides a good introduction to Delhi with a good review of history and culture.
It covers all the key highlights in the Delhi area and the places to stay and eat have good recommendations. However the restaurant, shopping and entertainment listings are a bit out of date now. It is impossible to keep listings accurate in a place as chaotic as India, where many of the best places to eat are roadside stalls. The excursions section focuses mostly on Agra and Jaipur. For someone who wants to travel around using Delhi as a base, the LP North India guidebook may be more useful as it has most of the Delhi information but includes more comprehensive material on Rajasthan and the Indian Himalayan areas. The maps are good but lack detail because most maps only show the main roads while often many interesting places are found in alleyways and small lanes. This guide ( like the LP series) is budgert minded which is a good thing but many of Delhi's better restaurants and entertainment are in the upscale hotels.
Very useful to the independent traveler who wants to spend some time in Delhi ( on a budget)

This Guide really helped us plan our trip in Northern India. We arrived not knowing where we really wanted to go and what we wanted to see. The Guide helped us plan where to stay, where to eat..and gave us enough information to help us distill what would be exciting for us. After reading about Pushkar..we hired a driver and arrived in a city that filled all of our expectations and hopes! We ate at the recommended restaurants and they did not disappoint. India is a country that is big,amazing and difficult to navigate, Lonely Planet showed us the way to having an unforgettable trip.

This is a concise but pretty good guide of Delhi, and I used it a lot during a long stay in this city, which in my opinion is much more interesting than many tourists think. The maps at the end are very useful. However, if you have to spend a good deal of time in Delhi, what you should really get is Delhi's "Eicher City Guide", which is just splendid. It's like a higher quality "eyewitness" guide of Delhi. Hundreds of excellent picture, a lot of historical information, and amazingly detailed city maps at the end. Eicher's maps cover the whole city (which is huge) and not just the tousist spots, so they can be immensely useful if you have to stay in Delhi for a long period. Eicher is unfortunately pretty old, and difficult to find in the US, but it's worth looking for it. It should not be difficult to find it in India (where it is published) for a fairly low price. My advice is to have both Eicher and the latest Lonely Planet guides.

While I have not purchased or used this guide, I did use the older Lonely Planet guide for Rajasthan, Delhi, and Agra published in 2005 as well as the Rough Guide for the same region. I definitely preferred the Rough Guide. I've searched inside the new Lonely Planet guide on Amazon and see that it might have some more color and pictures than the old book, but it generally seems similar. For instance, the new book has less than 2 pages about Fatehpur Sikri while the Rough Guide has 8. So, I would recommend the Rough Guide book instead.

My daughter and I referred to this book constantly during our recent travel to India. We found it to be extremely useful, full of information that we needed, without having to sift through information that we didn't need. I highly recommend this book to anyone traveling to India on a trip that includes visits to Delhi and Agra.

Well written. Lots of area information and uses lots of great maps. Very helpful in planning your future trip/s to the area.

Lonely Planet lives up to its reputation as the best budget travel guide out there. Great!