Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Turkey (Country Guide)

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

 

 

Okay first off, this reviewer is turkish and has been all over turkey for years from small towns to big cities. I stayed in dumps and magnificent 5 star hotels. This book is great for a portable reference (compared to what else is out there) I would also recommend rough guide's Turkey. Furthermore, I hear many people ranting on here about how the book doesn't rate this or is not located where it is. I'm going to be honest check the internet before you go. In Turkey if a website is not offered for a hotel over 80% of the time they are going to be "shady" as far as the people who are there and business, not all turks are friendly. As far as how they rate towns like Kusadasi and Bodrum, people need to understand every town or city has a rundown (ghetto) neighborhood. I've been to places like Kusadasi and find it very nice, but also on that aspect very touristy. Also, some cities exist just for tourism (no real turks live there) such as a city like Kas. Don't believe me then visit and see the ridiculous prices for restaurants and crappy souvenirs. If you want real Turkey this book will help you find it, but expect a few inaccuracies just because its written by a team of "westerners" who can't figure out which way is which in Turkey, direction wise. Most likely for the reasons of having pensions listed in the book with a map and location but not located where they are once you get where this book tells you.
So TRAVELERS understand ONE THING!!! Turkey is NOT England or USA Turkey is not far from a Third world country, a second world country possibly. You will find frequent power outages, inadequate roads, transportation is great in Turkey, but understand that staying at a pension in Turkey is not like staying in a pension in America or a hostel in Germany. You will get shady characters and sometimes bad business. In turkey there is glamour but on the beaten path expect wires hanging in the shower and expect small basic rooms, not no dang Hilton everywhere you go. So enjoy this book and enjoy Turkey but please keep an open mind and PLAN before you go stay at a pension that doesn't have a website or doesn't have even pictures online. Use this book along with [...] and you will have a better trip.
Sorry for the ranting...

I like my kindle a lot - i do, but a warning to travelers - unless you plan on reading this book cover to cover and committing every detail to photographic memory, do not put it on an e-reader. I thought it would be so great to liberate myself from carrying a phone book sized anchor with me.. but boy, was i wrong. It's almost impossible to find anything in it. For example - if you want to know when the Istanbul Modern closes, like i did today, i had to do a time consuming search with let me to various schedules for travelers spending one, two, three days in the city.. then i went to the Istanbul section and clicked through about 50 clicks until i finally got to the museum's introduction .. it was so frustrating. Also, forget the maps - the Kindle renders them in to gray blobs that have no use other than inspiring more clicking. Alas, its better to carry the real thing!

This book contains little updated information and much of the information contained is out of date. Buy the 10th edition used and save a bunch. I just got back from a two week trip to Turkey, and while the LP Turkey is in general a good guidebook, the 11th edition seems no better than the 10th. Part of this might be due to a lack of serious editing; for instance at the top of page 96, it should reference the map on page 114-115, which it does not (wrong pages).

Much of the information provided regarding the East gives one the impression that the authors did not actually visit the places they wrote about. For example, my traveling partner and I took the advice of the guidebook and took a tour of Mt. Nemrut with Harran-Nemrut tours based out of Urfa. The guidebook stressed that this tour company was run by someone who spoke fluent English and ran things efficiently. Instead, we were outfitted with an insufferable guide who forced my traveling partner to translate for the entire day. In addition, the guidebook is riddled with Turkish spelling errors (in case this matters to you) and contains multiple wrong telephone numbers for hotels. I recommend the Rough Guide to Turkey as a superior source of historical information and traveling tips. Once we stopped using Lonely Planet and just used the Rough Guide, we had much better luck.

We traveled all around Western Turkey for 17 days in June/July 2010. This book was invaluable. We visited Istanbul, Selcuk, Ephesus, Pamukkale, Afrodisias, Fethiye, Karakoy, Oludeniz, Antalya, Termessos, Goreme, and Ilhara... to name a few. Everything we needed was in the book. There was some really great advice on structuring itineraries, and good advice on what to see and what to avoid. For example, there is a sprawling tourist-trap of a town called Hironsu which is near Oludeniz, and even though there are dozens of tourist hotels & restaurants there, this book does not describe any of it. Good move, LP, you saved some folks from spending some totally mediocre time in a totally mediocre place.

We don't rely much on restaurant recommendations, preferring to just wing it on the spur of the moment, but we absolutely loved the hotels we stayed at. In fact the Lonely Planet top pick for hotel in Goreme was my favorite hotel I have ever stayed at, anywhere, ever... and believe me that is saying a lot. Not the most expensive, not the most luxurious, but definitely the most charming, fun, unique, friendly, beautiful... you get the idea. Kelebek Hotel, Goreme.

Anyway in all our 17 days I do not recall ever being disappointed by the LP book. There are a lot of people who complain about things being out of date, and I wonder if these are the kind of people who get upset when the guidebook says a price was $40 in 2008 and then they show up in 2010 and the price is $47. Any seasoned traveller understands that travel involves uncertainty. It's possible there were things out of date in the book but honestly I just don't recall it ever being a problem.

I just bought the Kindle iPad version of this guide. It's a complete failure, utterly unusable. You can't search the book, and have to go through about 28000 (!) indexed "locations" to navigate it. So, if you are looking for a specific place like, say, Datça, you really need to flick through all the pages to find it. It's really a piece of crap and I'd never recommend anyone to buy this version.

Having a spent a month in Turkey this year (primarily travelling off the beaten path) with this book as my main reference, I feel that I am more than qualified to review it. While this guide has a number of problems, it also has its merits. Much of the general information is quite accurate and their general advice proved itself to be extremely useful. For example, their description of the apple tea carpet salesman routine was freakishly accurate, and the entire time some guy was trying to sell me a carpet I couldn't help but note just how similar it was to what the book described. The environmental descriptions were quite accurate most of the way. By describing a lot of stuff off the beaten track in Turkey the book really encourages the traveller to actually experience authentic Turkey (which, as another reviewed noted, is not anything like Kusadashi or Kas.)

This is a good general guidebook and it got me around Turkey for a month. Do not be discouraged by the fact that I am now going to list a number of faults. Instead, use other resources to make up for these faults lest you get stuck somewhere. For one, the maps in the book are not always great. They are typically fine for more popular areas. The maps for Sultanahmet, for example, are just fine and you can find your way around without any trouble. However, the further you get from main tourist sites, the worse the maps get. The western sections of Istanbul inside the Theodosian Walls were nigh-unnavigable with the Lonely Planet maps because there were so many streets that simply did not show appear. I spent a lot of time lost in this part of town and was forced to resort to other maps and asking the locals. Another thing the book never mentioned were the obnoxious hucksters in the main tourist areas. While this is hardly a Turkish phenomenon, I did find them to be a lot more aggressive and irritating than anywhere else. Of course, once you're outside of any of the main tourist places you'll never see anyone like that other than children who seem to only know the word "money," and want some from you. Considering how often these things came up, the book's failure to mention them is notable. The book occasionally misrepresents historical sites as well. It claims that Perge, one of the most spectacular Roman cities I've ever seen (complete with a large theater, stadion, and Byzantine ruins on the hill at the end of the collondaded street) can be explored in an hour, whereas a day is more realistic. In a similar manner (and on the facing page) the book praises the ruins of Termessos. Termessos is in a spectacular location and is as easily accessible from Antalya as Perge, but the ruins at the site are unimpressive on their own, badly overgrown, and almost completely un-excavated. The book could also use better driving directions, information on parking, and general information on Turkish highways. I rented a car and learned as I went, leaning heavily on the GPS device the rental car company gave me. Some better general road maps and driving information could have alleviated a lot of stress, although I still managed to get around without too much trouble from the information in the book.

This is a good book. Although this review may seem overwhelmingly negative, I am merely pointing out some flaws so that anyone wishing to travel to Turkey with this book can make up for its defects with other materials. Other than these few caveats, this is an excellent book.

I checked the free version and I decided to buy it.

Lonely Planet is always a good way to start a trip (Is not enirely reliable but is a very good start).

Ofering a coloquial language with context, history is also a great introduction.

Lovely book with so much information we needed for our trip to Turkey next year. It's made us change plans and spend longer in country. Very informative.

This is really useful for getting you around the country and very utilitarian in that sense. However, it lacks sufficient information about many of the sites (or any in some cases). This is understandable though, as given how many sites there are, it would have to be a huge book to include info on all of them. In some sites, you can just pay for a guide, but obnviously that gets expensive after a while.