Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Russia, Ukraine & Belarus

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

 

 

So you have already seen the present (Moscow) and former (St. Petersburg) capital, and now you would like to see the "real Russia", or you have an airplane conference to attend in Kazan, or you have adopted a child from Murmansk, or you are meeting a prospective bride from Magadan (don't laugh--whenever I answer questions from people who are traveling to regions outside of Moscow/St. Petersburg, 80% are going for adoption or marriage!). There are almost no current guidebooks to regions such as Perm, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Volgograd, Crimea, Minsk, and the Far East. The 'Lonely Planet Russia and Ukraine' has the largest area coverage of any guide currently published in English.

It is also ideal for those taking a river cruise between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The coverage of the famed Trans-Siberian route is ok, although I think the 'Trans-Siberian Handbook' and 'Siberian Bam Guide : Rail, Rivers & Road' do a better job for those particular regions.

The Moscow/St. Petersburg sections are ok as well, although anyone spending more than a few days in each of those cities should look into guides that cover only those cities.

Restaurant, hotel and travel information are good, although could use more details. The history sections are adequate considering the scope of the book. Also, the twice-yearly updates at Lonely Planet's web site, although lacking in breadth and depth, provide some more timely information than what appears in the book.

Marc David Miller, Discovering Russia, New York

My wife and I will be spending the summer in her home town of Kiev. Since I am an American, I want to go with as much information as possible so that I can get the most out of my time there. To this end, I bought Let's Go Eastern Europe 2000 and Lonely Planet's Russia, Ukraine & Belarus 2000 books. We have reviewed both books and with respect to Ukraine, we find Lonely Planet's travel guide superior. It contains a lot more information about Ukraine than the Let's Go book. Of course the Let's Go book covers many more countries than the Lonely Planet guide so this fact is not surprising.

However, the Lonely Planet book is also more up-to-date. For instance, the Let's Go book makes very wrong predictions about the presidential election that took place last fall. It also contains exchange rates from last summer.

Meanwhile Lonely Planet not only talks about the actual result of last fall's elections, it tells how this set of elections significantly affects the country. My wife's parents generally confirm the observations Lonely Planet offers. Lonely Planet's guidebook also mentions several news events that are only a few months old.

I am very satisfied with the Lonely Planet travel guide and considerably more satisfied than I am with a leading alternative. I am looking forward to using it.

A good and usable guide to the entire Russia is still to be written. There are objective reasons for this - the country is huge, and 99% per cent of its territory has no hope of receiving meaningful numbers of tourists. Covering such an area adequately would be an incredibly difficult and expensive task; there is no travel publisher in the world at the moment willing to invest so much for so little expected in sales.

People who come to Russia mostly visit Moscow and St Petersburg, although a few also wander to the "Zolotoye Koltso" (Golden Ring) around Volga river - old cities of Vladimir, Suzdal or Uglich. If this is your case, the choice is easy: just pick one of the city guides (DK Eyewitness recommended - really the best, Fodor's Moscow and St Petersburg is also good, or try Rough Guide for less inspired but more exhaustive listings).

The question is - what to do if you go deeper into the country? Say, places in the Urals, or Russia's Far East? Well, you probably will have to dedicate a lot of effort to picking out nuggets of information from the Internet - preferably armed with some knowledge of the Russian language. Prepare your itinerary bit by bit, seek recommendations, write e-mails to people. It is time-consuming and requires effort, but you do not have a choice if you want to prepare for this trip properly.

Alternatively (an easy way, but not a good one) - buy this book, but make sure you have a pinch of salt on you. A spoonful of salt, rather. Or better make it a sack of salt. The shortcomings of this book have been noted by others: hopelessly outdated, inaccurate, poorly researched. There is a distinct feeling writers either did not visit some of the places they wrote about or spent very little time there. As for pricing information, you will be better off with a random number generator or a casino roulette than this book. I have never seen a guide where price information would be so disconnected from the reality.

There is also a matter of certain arrogance and disrespect to local culture, noted by one reviewer. Lonely Planet is famed for not pulling any punches and giving writers a lot of freedom to voice their opinions, but at times the feeling of writers' perceived cultural superiority is over the top.

So is this book worth buying at all? Well, maybe, if you don't mind carrying around something of very limited practical use. Luggage allowance permitting, you might as well have it - one out of five telephone numbers shown in the book might be still valid, some of the addresses may be accurate. Opening times? Here's rule of thumb: try between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays, chances are, the place will be open. It may occasionally prove useful, for the absence of a better choice, but please do not have excessive expectations.

The same is true for Belarus - the country is no more welcoming to travellers than Libya or Sudan, nosy travellers risk imprisonment and serious travel writing is practically non-existent. You can try using Lonely Planet, or you can get an excellent listings magazine Minsk In Your Pocket.

For Ukraine, choices are better. The country is relatively well-covered by general Eastern Europe guides, there is brilliant Hippocrene Language and Travel Guide to Ukraine (by Linda Hodges and George Chumak), or Ukraine Culture Shock by Meredith Dalton. Generally, you will find Ukraine friendlier to Westerners than Russia or Belarus and, most importantly, not preoccupied by desperate superpower ambitions and constant need to reassert its greatness.

I gave this Lonely Planet guide one star not only because you have to give it at least one star under Amazon system. The book deserves a star because it attempted to cover Russia, Ukraine and Belarus first. Commendable ambition, but sadly, the result is very poor. Maybe they will put together a better team next time, give it a bit more time and check their writing more meticulously.

So you have already seen the present and former capital, and now you would like to see the "real Russia", or you have adopted a child from Murmansk, or you are meeting a prospective bride from Magadan (don't laugh--whenever I answer questions from people who are traveling to regions outside of Moscow/St. Petersburg, 80% are going for adoption or marriage!). There are almost no current guidebooks to regions such as Perm, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Volgograd, Crimea, Minsk, and the Far East. The 'Lonely Planet Russia, Ukraine & Belarus (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, 2Nded)' has the largest area coverage of any guide currently published in English.

It is also ideal for those taking a river cruise between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The coverage of the famed Trans-Siberian route is ok, although I think the 'Trans-Siberian Handbook' and 'Siberian Bam Guide : Rail, Rivers & Road' do a better job for those particular regions.

The Moscow/St. Petersburg sections are ok as well, although I think anyone spending more than a few days in each of those cities should look into guides that cover only those cities.

Restaurant, hotel and travel information are good, although could use more details. The history sections are adequate considering the scope of the book. Also, the twice-yearly updates at Lonely Planet's web site, although lacking in breadth and depth, provide some more timely information than what appears in the book.

I agree with the last reviewer that this was a book I could not rely on in Russia. The information is very old, the prices are completely out of whack, and someone in Russia took a look at the book and said it is virtually a carbon copy of the last edition. The details on Siberia were pathetic. It was clear that the writer had only been to a very few places and some information was outright incorrect. I had much better luck with the Trans-Siberian Handbook by Bryn Thomas. The information is three years old, but the information about major cities in Siberia and Russia is comprehensive, accurate, and engaging.

This review is a follow-up to my May 13, 2000 review and only addresses the Ukraine portion of this guidebook. My wife and I did spend our entire summer in Ukraine and used this guidebook as our travel bible. We found the information up-to-date and accurate. We also generally agreed with the advise which I think is remarkable since, with three months there, my wife took me to see just about everything the book suggested doing in Kiev and many things it merely discussed but did not recommend. Additionally we also traveled throughout western Ukraine for two weeks. In fact, we went on a group tour of western Ukraine and our guidebook turned out to be a big hit. Everyone on the bus wanted to read it. A fellow traveler who had brought Let's Go Eastern Europe 2000 with him agreed that Lonely Planet was much better. Until something newer comes out, with respect to Ukraine guidebooks I think Lonely Planet can't be beat.

I travelled through Russia from Magadan to Minsk one month in July/August 2000 and had the lp Russia, Ukraine & Belarus as a travel book. After having used several lp guide books I must say, that this one is a very bad one. The information is old, some at least 5 years, there are wrong or missing adresses of hotels and museums, wrong and inconsistent information about prices, locations and shedules and even some errors in the maps. Especially the prices for travel and accomodation given in the book are about twice the actual price. A lot of cheap hotels are missing but the book is just full of 5-star super-expensive hotels. The part about Siberia and the Russian Far East is much too short. But the worst thing about that book is - in my eyes - the sometimes really unrespectful and unfriendly (to the Russian people) language chosen especially in the captions and comments. I never read that before in a lp-book. One star for the good maps of Moscow and Petersburg and one because it is pretty much the only book covering whole Russia.

Any guide which tries to everextent itself by covering a too big an area will shortchange the reader, inspite of the best intensions. This is the case with this nitty-gritty Lonley Planet guide to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. I've found the information for Ukraine far less useful than in Linda Hodges' guide to Ukraine. Lonley Planet treats Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as if it still were part of the same country it was 11 years ago. All three countries have their unique pluses and minuses, and, lets face it, deserve their own individual guides. The reader is not being made aware enough and therefore does not really appreciate the fact that, for example, Russia and Ukraine are very different from one another, and any similarities are far less common than once assumed.What I liked best about the Lonley Planet guide,and the same is true for their other guides, are the details about the obscure and less-known hotels and restaurants.

If you are planning only for staying in Moscow and St. Petersburg or want to travel with the Transibirian Train, don't use the book - there are better ones. This guidebook has it's strength certainly for the broad (and thus mostly not very deep) information and it is quite all right if you are travelling AROUND in Russia and visit also some of the smaller cities.

A fine thing I found out was the (sometimes a little too small) maps of nearly every town and the information about how to get to the place and how to leave it again.

On the other hand, the information about hotels' prices is VERY old and out of date completely. Expect to pay 2 to 4 times more than published in the book, Russia has get more expensive since the book has been written! So it is still better to check for hotels on the internet or to ask taxidrivers to lead you to a cheap one and if there's no place left, just go on with the same taxi to the next one. However if you don't care about paying sometimes around 60 Dollars or more a night then this doesn't matter anyway and the information about the hotels themselves is still right.

It is undoubtedly hard to write a good guidebook on countries like Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, where the situation has been changing daily for the last 12 years, in almost every aspect of life. Hotels, restaurants and other outlets change. Styles of life change, as do security and the uninspiring state bureaucracy. Yet, Lonely Planet has successfully overcome this challenge, and produced an excellent guidebook, perhaps only slight below its usual excellent standard. Information on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, etc, is thorough and wise, and is a must for any traveler. The guidebook is perhaps weaker on other, more remote, regions of these three countries, as one would expect. The facts about the country (history, culture, etc) are of great interest and excellently written. This is definitely a book not to be left out of your baggage before you take off.