Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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

 

 

The Rough Guides are usually written in a colorful, well-researched manner that makes them a joy to have along in order to learn about the places you are visiting while exploring the area, and this book delivers along those lines. Also true to Rough Guide form, however, the book lacks important details regarding transportation: how many buses, how often, where to buy tickets, best routes, etc.

The Baltic countries have experienced a major boom in tourism since EU membership in May 2004, and hotel rooms are booked far in advance. As such, Rough needs to expand their listings to include a larger percentage of hotels. In August 2004 we found all the hotels listed in the Rough Guide fully booked in all 3 Baltic capitals! Admittedly, we did not plan very far ahead, and to be fair to this book, we did not find a major guide with more complete hotel listings.

The Listings section in each chapter also provides a handy reference. In general, however, Rough should expand this section to make it really useful, as listings are a bit limited. They should also start adding sections such as: Cyber cafes with digital photo downloads, Where to buy a GSM SIM chip, and similar sections for the digital traveler, to really make the listings complete.

In each major destination, this book includes walking tours with some interesting information on buildings, churches and monuments, intertwined with history and cultural observations that makes for enjoyable reading and walks. We were glad to have this book along.

This book provides some interesting background information about the countries, but was not organized very well to serve as a reference on-the-fly. While you may be interested in reading about Latvian daina song-poems from your living room before leaving on your trip, you'll find yourself cursing all that information when you're just trying to find some specific tip on bus routes to the ethnographic museum. If your itinerary is going to focus mainly on the capital cities, as mine did, I would highly recommend the book Bradt Baltic Capitals. It was infinitely more useful than the Rough Guide, cheaper, and half the size and weight.

Used this on trip to Estonia and Latvia. Had great historical info and very accurate listings of restaurants, museums, etc. Jam packed with pretty much any information you could want. Excellent assortment of places for all different $ amounts. I was with a tour group, and our guide had a copy of this guidebook for his own reference. That's the second time I've been on an organized tour where the guide has constantly referred to his Rough Guide.

The product was in excellent shape when I received it. The book looked as if it were new and bought right off the book store shelf.