Customer Reviews

Sydney (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

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

 

 

I must say I am pretty impressed by this travel guide to Sydney. And I can doubly assure you of that it is excellent because I live here in Sydney! The reason I got this book was because in my experience the best travel guides are generally the ones from DK and this one didn't dissappoint. A travel guide like this is great for people who come to Sydney and stay with me. I can lend them this book to get around town during the weekdays while I am at work - but that said, even I find it useful.

I do a fair bit of travelling around internationallly and tend to take Sydney for granted. Reading through this book there are great little accounts of it's history as well as interesting suggestions for good restaurants and bars. When you've lived in a place for a long time you tend to frequent the same favorite spots over and over so it's nice getting tips for 'best restaurants and bars' that differ from those from other sources. One of the best things here are the walks at the back. I know most of the areas on them modestly well but I must say they are brilliantly planned. Also, as always, the maps of every suburb listed here are excellent for the novice to navigate around this city.

As for shortcomings, these are few and far between but even then it seems you can't please everyone. You can easily list things that could have been covered in better detail - but then again most people who visit here just won't have enough time to cover them all. Chinatown for one gets covered rather superficially. Also there is excessive coverage of St Mary's Cathedral - you can find plenty of far older and architechturally grander churches in any town in Europe. Churches of this size are rare here in Australia so for Australians it is considered worthy of mention but otherwise don't even bother going there. Ditto for the Art Gallery of New South Wales - compared to Boston, New York or any major European city it is laughable, except of course for the wonderful Aboriginal section there. As for the rest of it, I find it an embarrassment that the authors insist on dwelling on it.

Lastly, as for budget restaurants, there are plenty of them listed in this book. There is a book here in Sydney called 'Cheap Eats' if you really wanted a book that listed the best budget restaurants in town. Also if you really think about it, an exceptionally expensive top notch restaurant here is regarded as costing around $70-100 Australian per person, which is around $50-75 US dollars. By European and especially by UK standards - this is pretty damned cheap. Reviews I have read of the finest Sydney restaurants in the international press have all been glowing as well. The ones listed here are pretty good picks although the Sydney Morning Herald guide provides a more up to date view of Sydney cuisine. It's all also a matter of taste and opinion too.

So if you are thinking of visiting this beautiful city buy this book with confidence. Even I learned more than a thing or two from it.

I just got back from 10 days in Sydney, and I took this book and also the Rough Guide to Sydney. This book is vastly superior to the other.

The book has a lot of good information, and I really like the format. Every page is color, and full of illustrations and excellent maps. Call me a child of the media age, but it's so much easier to flip through this book, compared to reading through long blocks of text.

The maps are really worth emphasizing. I used the maps to follow various walking trails through different parts of the city, and they were excellent in terms of mentioning things to look out for.

The only disappointment I had was that this book hardly covered North Sydney, which is where I was staying. Now, granted, there aren't really too many tourist activities in North Sydney, but it is an interesting area, and the entire north side of the harbor is worth exploring, in my opinion. The restaurants are great, the neighborhoods are beautiful. Also, there are really some incredible views of the opera house from the north shore.

Best of all, this book fits (snugly) in a back pocket. I highly recommend this book.

this got a lot of good reviews and I was a bit disappointed. The format is easy to read, and there IS a lot of good information in the book. This book isn't going to help you find good cheap restaurants. Most of the restaurants and bars listed are expensive. This book is far better than the Rough Guides or Lonely Planet for sure BUT I'll be ordering Frommers to take with me when I go to Australia...

This guide is excellent. It has more than I expected and very informative. It is in like new condition. It saved me a lot of money. Thank you Amazon.

This travel guide is one of the best, detailed books on Sydney. I have many Eyewitness Guides for other locations around the world. The detailed maps in the back of the book are very useful when in an unfamiliar place.

This book just arrived today, and I anxsiously started leafing through it. I was looking in the section with hotels, and there were several the book mentioned that I wanted to check out. Now here is the confusing part... honestly, ALL four of the websites I went to first were no longer valid. Either squatters had taken up residence on the site, or I got the old "this page is no longer available" message. And it's not like I forgot to type the .au or anything, the info was just bogus. I am giving it two stars because I'm sure I will get other good info out of the book. I even kind of expect travel books to have some outdated info, but for a book that was released in 2010 to have the first four websites I try to go to be totally inaccurate is unforgiveable in my mind. I can only assume that they re-released it this year without any fact checking.

Just spent a week in Sydney and found the book helpful in terms of the downtown area and Sydney proper. But I really wished it had more in the Outskirts section. There isn't a ton to see in Sydney proper but lots to see on the outer edges, an hour away, etc. Perhaps they need a New South Wales guidebook since the Australia guidebook tries to put too much into it. Anyway - if you're going to spend your whole trip right in downtown, this book works fine. If you get a little antsy for a little more color, keep looking. (And, btw, I usually LOVE Eyewitness travel guides. I have at least 10 others.)

The description said like new, and when I got it I was surprised, it was like new.