Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to Yucatan 1 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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I don't usually bother to do this, but I just wanted to post here that this guidebook is great: full of interesting ideas, and very trustworthy. All the basics are covered, but it also includes funny and reliable tips on cool places the average tourist might not go to, like Punta Allen and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. I really liked the fact that when the book covers the crucial tourist areas, it also includes a range options for making your experience even more enjoyable and varied, like mentioning spots that the locals actually go to. You can tell that whoever wrote this book did a lot of exploring to find interesting places.

It's a Rough Guide, so the maps are pretty good and there's all the nitty-gritty travel info I would want. I thought the info on renting a car was helpful, as it included tips on local driving rules that actually took the fear and mystery out of driving there for me.

By the way: you can find *delicious* food when you use this book. Sometimes it seems like guidebooks just reproduce whatever random restaurants are included in other books, but that's not the case here. The restaurants were always really good, and there was a range of price choices. Even the street-vendor suggestions are worth checking out.

This book was excellent for our needs. We rented a car and drove around the Yucatan, not the Cancun strip but other less travelled areas. One good thing is that the book was recently updated, the area has changed so fast that you need a current guidebook to keep up with the rapid development. The maps were good inside the book and also the history and description was readable not boring like in some of the books. One oddity though was that the author ignored Akumal, where we spent six pleasant days at a modestly priced resort that wasn't even mentioned in the book. Don't know why the entire town was basically ignored when it is a signficant destination and other guidebooks cover it. However overall the book was quite useful to me. I also bought the Rough Guide road map which was also very helpful because the signage is often poor.

We just returned from a great trip to the Yucatan, and this guide is worth more than you can imagine. Despite being a little concerned at a couple of the suggested restaurants(they don't speak English, and they are obviously for a local audience), we never got sick, the food was delicious, and a great bargain. We are planning on purchasing Rough Guides for all of our trips, to make the most of the maps, trip, and restaurant suggestions. However, this guide was published in 2005, and the prices are a little higher now, and one restaurant was not there. Not too bad since Playa del Carmen is rapidly changing. Buy this guide, have a great trip, and travel smart!

Compact, detailed and great guide. Check in every archaeological site, as new discoveries are made in the Yucatan. Every day the INAH is opening new sites for the public.