The Rough Guide to Greece, 8th [Paperback]

Mark Ellingham (Author), Marc Dubin (Author), Natania Jan (Author)

Book Description

Series: Rough Guide to Greece | Publication Date: April 1, 2000

This guide contains listings of the best places to stay, eat and drink in every region. It has information on attractions, from ancient monuments to Athenian nightclubs, Greece's history, culture and natural history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Famously honest. -- Daily Mail, London, UK

For independent travel, the Rough Guides are the most useful source. -- Daily Telegraph, London, UK

The best currrent general guidebook for Greece. -- CondŽ Nast Traveler, USA

About the Author

Written and researched by a team of experienced Rough Guide authors, including two of the founders of Rough Guides, Mark Ellingham and John Fisher. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 912 pages
• Publisher: Rough Guides; 8th edition (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1858285151
• ISBN-13: 978-1858285153
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 4.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,803,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just OK, September 3, 2001

By 

Roy Gordon (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Rough Guide to Greece, 8th (Paperback)

This review compares the Lonely Plantet Greece (4th Edition) with the Rough Guide Greece (8th edition). We spent 2.5 weeks in July, 2001 in Greece, our first visit, and these were our guide books.
A relucant 4 stars to each, and a slight preference for RG. We certainly found the books serviceable, and they gave us good ideas of where in Greece we wanted to go. But they were much less valuable in their listings for individual destinations. They were the least valuable compared to the other LP and RG travel books we've used (Portugal, Italy, Thailand, Tokyo).

As usual, they both overstate their hotel rankings which to me make sense only if you've been sleeping out on the beach from necessity, and now have finally scraped some money together for a room. An exagerration, but I've lost patience with gushing praise for facilities which are usually no better than serviceable and sometimes less than that. And, we're not into spending money on fancy accommodations. Occassionaly the books are on the money, but often not.

On the smaller islands RG usually had more accommodation listings, but occassionally LP did. There were at least two instances when LP had none, just saying that rooms were available.

The ferry schedules in the books, pretty much consistent between them, bore little relation to reality, even though we were there in the high season.

I want to complete with my usual gripe about these and other guide books: we don't know which restaurants and hotels were actually visited by the writers (and by which one) and when. To paraphrase from my review of RG Portugal:

LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized by the reviewers with the date. This would allow us to learn each reviewer's tastes and standards, not to mention seeing which places they actually visited.

One LP writer (not I think an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!"

Talk to the owners for your evaluation! Says it all.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, concise, relevant, practical!, May 21, 2001

By 

[e-mail] - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rough Guide to Greece, 8th (Paperback)

We just came back from a 3 weeks, modest-budget, partly backpacking, partly car-rental trip around Rhodes, Crete, and Peloponnese. We deliberately stayed off the beaten tracks as much as possible. We used this guide along with French "Guide du Routard" and Michelin guides. I picked this guide against the Lonely Planet one based on an excellent experience with the Corsica rough guide last year.

This Rough Guide was above all very practical -- it simply is amazingly detailed, and what's more, it's mostly right. The rooms , hotels, and restaurants suggested were spot on. Very few outdated entries.

This guide also includes much relevant background info on Greek history, politics, food, an so on. This made for a much more interesting trip.

The paper was very thin yet high quality, making this guide even more worth its space in my pack.

This is definitely not the guide for organized tours -- the authors make no secret of their disdain for package tourism and the spoiling it often brings. But, for the independent traveller, this is the best guide I have found in English or French.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Capable enough to get you through high tide..., January 24, 2001

By 

Greekfreak (Pusan Korea (South)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rough Guide to Greece, 8th (Paperback)

Most of my friends often recommend the Lonely Planet books, especially for those of us who can't mortgage our homes for one-night stays in hotels listed by Frommer's and Fodor's guides. But I went with Rough Guide for my trip last summer to Greece, and while some of the maps weren't as detailed as they could might have been, most of the recommendations were spot on.

Many nightspots get renovated; names get changed, etc. That's something the editors can't really help with. But any restaurant or bar I went to (listed in the guide) was above-average, if not better than they claimed.

The historical data was also well-balanced; so you're not bored to tears with it, and yet it's detailed enough to keep you reading through it. Bonus marks for the great inclusion of the Greek music coverage (flawed, but excellent), and the price of the book is decent.