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Friday, February 02, 2007


The Lonely Planet Thailand

The Lonely Planet guides to various countries have long been a staple for backpackers and the adventurous mainstream traveler. This one is thorough, detailed, and possessed of a great number of useful maps, phone numbers, etc. At over eight-hundred pages it’s also quite a bit too big to take with you on the road. So it’s a helpful book to read through in detail BEFORE you buy your plane tickets and plan your itinerary.

So that’s what I did. Over the course of several rainy nights in Vancouver I plowed through all the descriptions of the different cities and provinces, skimmed the restaurant and hotel reviews for the most part, then selected three destinations for The Professor and my trip there over New Years.

This is a book review site, not a travelogue, so I’ll skip all the details on the trip, except to say that Thailand is an incredible place, which I look forward to returning to—and that the Lonely Planet: Thailand helped prepare us for the trip quite well.

My only complaint is that the section on health towards the end of the book tends to be a bit scarier than it needs to be. It’s got grisly descriptions of all the various jungle diseases that one MIGHT contract; enough to make the faint of heart say, “I’m NEVER going there!” Which would be a major mistake…

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