Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23165 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 316 pages

Customer Reviews

FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO GET OFF THE BEATEN PATH!,
If you are familiar with the Lonely Planet series you know what this book is about, and as with the other LP guides I found it very helpful during my trip. Lots of great info for the traveler who likes to explore off the beaten path and the economy minded traveler. Very helpful info concerning the ruin sites. Made my hole trip great! The only sad part was my visit to Playa Del Carmen. Last time I was there was over ten years ago when it was a small village with unpaved streets, now it has grown into a small version of Cancun. Oh! one other bit of advice, If your into the ruin sites you must read John Loyd Stevens books.

Since my original review I have to add a recommendation: TOURIST IN THE YUCATAN cool thriller set in the Yucatan!

Very helpful for the Rivera Maya, but.......
Just back from three weeks touring the Yucatan and this guide book was very helpful for Cancun, Cozmel, and the Rivera Maya. However, it was not sufficient the greater Yucatan. For that recommend Yucatan (Lonely Planet Regional Guides). You also should get a copy of the thriller hit A Tourist in the Yucatan for some great beach reading!.

Alas suffers from wrong information
Just came back from holiday from september to october 2009. I have used the most recent version (edition 2008). For getting around a country a guide book has been very helpfull in the past, I loved lonely planets for this. But this edition send us absolutely to the wrong places.

For the northern part it was correct, although a bit sparse on background information about the different cities. But it really went downhill when we went to ciudad del carmen. Near this place, in laguna de terminos you could kayak your way through mangroves and spot turtles etc. And it even said so on the overview map on page 3. But first of all the city isn't as charming as described, everybody asked us what we were doing there (because there was nothing to do or see). The tourist office only spoke spanish and didn't know a thing about the kayak thing. So we went to puerto real, a very small place (why it made the main map I dont know). Same thing there, nobody knew about kayaking. Because they want to help we were sent all over town and still got nowhere.
Yes you probably can kayak here, of you are one of those lucky tourist who visits countries with his own 4 meter long and 1 meter wide kayak then you can go here, otherwise don't bother. Relying on the LP costed us 2 days of our holiday and a very large detour.

Near calakmul we understood how some of the information was gathered for this edition, by asking at hotels and not visiting the sites themselves. In this hotel we checked the Moon-guide, it was very helpfull for the rest of our trip. Because here it told us about mahahual which is a very nice snorkleplace in mexico near the belizean border. It was very very sparsely covered in our edition.
Here we learned the writer visited this site a few weeks after the hurricane hit, talked to one person only!!! and wrote this down! About 1 and a half years later this book was published. Probably not exemplary for all of the book, but parts of it are very badly researched!

In my opinion that's how accurate the information was.

I advise using the moonguide for this part of mexico!
A shame, for Senegal and Sri Lanka I swore by the LP, but now my views have changed because of this book.
Dont buy it.