Rough Guides Europe on a Budget

It’s been a while since we checked in on the new travel guide books being produced by Rough Guides, and they’ve had a busy start to the 2010 publishing year. You’re in luck if you’re planning a trip to any of the following destinations, because they have hot off the press guides ready for you:

• At almost 1300 pages, the second edition of the Europe on a Budget guide is not something light to stuff in the corner of your backpack, but it is pretty comprehensive – and for the first time it also covers Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.
• For a city that really needs no more introduction, Rough Guides has produced their 12th edition of a guide to Paris – the old versions were already pretty good so the new one is simply an updated version.
• With Asia being such a popular destination for gap year travelers and backpackers on a budget, the new edition of the First-Time Asia Rough Guide is useful – it covers 21 different Asian countries with lots of tips for first-timers.
• Just in time for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, there is a new edition of the Cape Town, The Winelands & the Garden Route guide for the western corner of South Africa.
• Finally, still pumping out lots of detailed Italian guides, there is a new edition of Venice & the Veneto, also published in February 2010.

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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Travel Books: New From Rough Guides in 2010

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The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout is more than just another Top 100 style travel book. Volunteer vacations (aka voluntourism) are becoming more and more popular – Grout quotes a 2008 study which says 40% of Americans would like to do some volunteering while on vacation – and finding volunteer opportunities which offer a good deal to both sides is something everyone could use some help with.

100 Best Volunteer Vacations

The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations has a simple enough concept: it’s divided up into seven continental-type regions, with a bunch of volunteer vacation opportunities described in each. But it’s more than just a simple catalog, because each opportunity gets at least two pages, and sometimes four or five, devoted to it – describing how the organisation began, listing the typical tasks of volunteers, providing extra information and anecdotes in pull-out boxes, and finishing up with some contact information and a rough estimate of costs for volunteers.

The types of volunteer work included are many and varied – from working in a soup kitchen in Argentina to bottle-feeding orphaned lion cubs in Zambia, and a whole lot of other stuff in between. It’s a great resource to inspire people to find different volunteer opportunities.
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Book Review: The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations

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There’s no disputing that the late 2009 edition of Travel + Leisure magazine’s glossy coffee table book 100 Greatest Trips is a beautiful book, but it should really be renamed “100 Greatest Trips To Places Western Tourists Are Likely To Go”. While all the continents are represented in the book, there’s a huge emphasis on trips within North America and Western Europe, with very little attention paid to Africa or South America and a whole lot of special destinations in Australia and Eastern Europe missing as well.

100 Greatest Trips

Having said that, it’s still a lovely book to browse through if you are in the mood for daydreaming about future trips. Each of the 100 trips is really just a mere suggestion of a destination, often focused on one aspect like dining or shopping, but there are unique ideas included which might be the spark of your plan to travel to a particular destination. Color photographs illustrate the trip pages and at the back of the book, a basic guide to each destination with some information on hotels, restaurants and attractions rounds out the book. Towards the very back is one particular useful but not very prominent page – an index to the trips arranged into categories like beaches, nightlife, drives, adventure and shopping, a useful list if you’re looking for trip inspiration to suit your traveling style.
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Book Review: 100 Greatest Trips

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Being an eco-friendly traveler is getting ever higher on the agenda these days and with the new Australia’s Best Eco-Friendly Holidays: Over 1,000 Unique Travel Experiences by Ken Eastwood, part of the Explore Australia series, there are plenty of opportunities for willing tourists to find sustainable and environmentally sound activities throughout Australia.

Australia's Best Eco-Friendly Holidays

This book functions as a practical guide book, including detailed information on the activities and accommodation it promotes as being eco-friendly, but is also a large format book with attractive photographs which make a sustainable Down Under vacation seem like a particularly good idea. It is divided into sections according to states, and also includes a chapter on “far flung” adventures to lesser known offshore Australia, including places like Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

At the beginning of each section, Eastwood has compiled a “Top Ten” list of the most interesting eco attractions in each state and these provide a good guide and food for thought in the planning stages of a trip. There are even maps included which are comprehensive enough to be useful but still fit in to the overall attractiveness of the book. Even for those who are not particularly set on an eco-holiday, there are still some great ideas to be found in this guide.
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Book Review: Australia’s Best Eco-Friendly Holidays

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A lot of us dream about becoming a flight attendant when we’re younger, but for the few who turn their dream into reality, they might just find that the reality is not quite as romantic as we like to believe. And if the book Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant’s Tale of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet by Elliott Hester – also sometimes found under the title “Air Confidential” – is anything to go by, it’s far from romantic at all!

Plane Insanity

Hester tells a bunch of tales about his experiences as a flight attendant on both domestic and international flights, dealing with some very unusual passengers and sometimes even strange colleagues. You might learn some surprising things about the life of a flight attendant – I was surprised to learn that they sometimes might end up with nothing to eat, if there’s just exactly enough meals on board to take care of the passengers. And the harsh reality of flying round and round the world with not enough rest reminds me that this is definitely not a career move I want to make.

All travelers will get some new insights – and a few good laughs – out of reading this book, but perhaps the best audience are other flight attendants, who will sympathize with what must be universal gripes and compaints about a tricky career.

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Plane Insanity

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Better than many of the current flock of “places to go before …” travel guide books, Frommer’s 500 Places to Take Your Kids Before They Grow Up by Holly Hughes and Julie Duchaine makes a sensible point: there are some places that you can visit that your kids might enjoy the most while they are still kids, and it seems to me that it is worthwhile to make a list of these.

500 Places to Take Your Kids

Instead of the regular doomsday information in books like 500 Places to See Before They Disappear (also from Holly Hughes, incidentally, who obviously loves lists), this guide has a good selection of tourist sights across the globe that are suitable to travel to and enjoy with children. The places are divided into seventeen different categories, so that traveling families can pick out the themes that best suit the interests of their children and family, such as animals, science, medieval times, sports, and so on.

Each destination listing has a page or more of information, including the age range for which it is suitable, a detailed description of what to see and do there, conntact details and website information, how to get there and usually a hotel recommendation too, and finally, a snappy “why the kids will thank you” one sentence summary. At the end of the book, maps show the various sights by continent to help you with trip planning or just trip dreaming.
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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: 500 Places to Take Your Kids

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With so many books on travel in China coming out these days, it’s clear that we readers have a fascination with this important country; even though not that many of us have visited China yet, we all want to read about it. And for a modern look at some “real life” for a foreigner in China, James West’a Beijing Blur: A Head-Spinning Journey Into Modern China is a great addition.

Bejing Blur

Beijing Blur is the story of five seasons spent in China by Australian journalist West. Working for a Chinese radio station, West’s experiences are many and varied, and often not what we’ve come to expect from China travelogues – just as an example, the book opens at a rave held on the Great Wall of China.

After this unusual beginning, West sets out his expectations of China, gleaned from childhood meals at Chinese restaurants back home and flamboyant Hong Kong films. As you might expect, the reality of China is somewhat different, and West sinks into culture shock to start with. But things get better, and he gives us all kinds of interesting insights into the life of a foreigner in Beijing, including his first attempt to stamp out corruption (he hands back the bribe money handed out to a bunch of journalists with their press packs) and meets some of the current young generation, growing up somewhat spoiled in “New China”, and finds out how they really tick.
photo credit: Peter Fuchs

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

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Italy’s a common destination for travel writers, but not so many of them head to Siciliy and decide to circumnavigate it on a Vespa scooter. But that’s what British travel and food writer Matthew Fort did and it led to his book Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons: Travels in Sicily on a Vespa.

Fort was inspired by an earlier trip to Sicily with his brother, way back in 1973. Something about Sicily got into his blood; Fort thought

Sicily seemed different in some profound, subtle way that I couldn’t put my finger on. It was complex, convoluted, weird.

It turned into 33 years later before Fort got back to Sicily, by which time he had decided that cooking and eating were the keys to understanding the island, and that the best way to spend two months exploring it was on a Vespa scooter named Monica.

Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons follows not only Fort’s modern day travels and the many interesting Sicilians he meets, but also dips back into his first trip and, most deliciously, even includes a bunch of recipes for some of the local delicacies he discovers on his journey. So be warned – if you haven’t had a solid meal before reading this book, it’s the kind that will definitely make you hungry.
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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons

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The new 2009 edition of The Ethical Travel Guide: Your Passport to Exciting Alternative Holidays by Polly Pattullo and Orely Minelli starts with forty pages of discussion on the topic of ethical travel, written by Polly Pattullo. There are facts and figures on the state of tourism in the world at the moment, and then some enlightening information on where travel seems unethical these days. For example, Pattullo describes the situation on the Maldives, the islands we associate with luxury dive and snorkel holidays, but it’s also a country where 42% of its population live in poverty on around US$1 a day, and don’t benefit from tourism at all.

The first part of the book continues through particular ethical issues, like whether or not we should fly in planes in these days of climate change and carbon emissions talks, and a quick mention of the rights of porters on treks as well.

The second half of The Ethical Travel Guide divides the world into continental regions and gives us a directory of accommodation, volunteer organisations, sights and tour operators which fit ethical travel principles. Most entries have just one paragraph of description but there are often websites given to find further information. If you are planning a trip and want to access ethical operators and companies wherever possible, then this guide will give you plenty of ideas.
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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: The Ethical Travel Guide

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Michael Moran’s A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland is the kind of travel book that can inspire an armchair traveler to want to visit a place they’ve never had a special interest in before – and that’s because this is a literary travel narrative, written beautifully and with enough grounded historical research to make it fascinating.

A country in the Moon

Moran, originally born in Australia but something of a wanderer, ended up being sent to work in Poland in the early 1990s just after the fall of communism, which turned out to be a very opportune way to observe this country and its people adjusting to the modern world. He gradually gets to know the Polish as a people – progressing from overhearing conversations suggesting that Poles have bad table manners and drink too much through to developing deep and lasting relationships with many of them – especially Zosia, who he eventually marries.

Throughout this transformation, Moran manages to weave in an incredible amount of historical and cultural information in a very palatable way, so that as a reader you end up both knowing a lot about Poland, and feeling that you have followed a satisfying story through to its conclusion.
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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: A Country in the Moon

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With a close friend about to embark on a month in Ecuador including a trip to one of the destinations I’ve always wanted to get to, the Galapagos Islands, I thought it was a good time to look at the new second edition of the Frommer’s Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands guide. The front cover with its “blue footed boobie” birds typifies one of the main reasons tourists visit Ecuador – to see the wilderness and nature of the Galapagos Islands.

If, like me, you’ve been dreaming and reading about a trip to this area for a long time, then the quick update at the very front of the guide on “What’s New” will be very handy – it includes information like the delay on the new international airport in Quito, new discoveries on the Galapagos and something I wasn’t looking for, but sounds great, a new surfing and Spanish combination school on the southern coast.

The rest of the guidebook follows the standard pattern of a Frommer’s guide: an overview of the best of Ecuador, a chapter on cultural matters, suggested itineraries and sections for each of the geographical regions of the country. Like all guidebooks, the information is only as up-to-date as the last time it was checked (and in the physical guidebook publishing world, this is not so recent) but there are numerous website links so you can check the latest.
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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

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By far one of the most famous parks in the world, if not the most famous, is New York’s Central Park – and if you either aren’t able to get to New York to visit it just yet, or if you’re there and you want to understand every detail of it, then the beautiful new book Seeing Central Park: The Official Guide to the World’s Greatest Urban Park by Sara Cedar Miller is what you need. Miller is the official photographer and historian for the Central Park Conservancy group, and has been for the past 25 years, so there’s not realy a better choice for your photographic and historical guide to the park.

Seeing Central Park

Seeing Central Park is something like a cross between a small coffee table book and a travel guide book. It’s full of beautiful photographs of every aspect of the park, and it is also packed with information about how each part of the park came about. If you had a day or two to wander through the park with this book in hand, it would be an interesting experience to get to know Central Park properly. To help you, there are various maps and diagrams so you’ll have no doubt about which features Miller is referring to. But these don’t intrude too much, so it’s also possible to enjoy the book without ever stepping foot inside Central Park.
photo credit: chrisbastian44

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Seeing Central Park

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Susan Jane Gilmore, now a successful writer, was a mere college graduate when she and her college friend Claire decided to buy a backpack and travel around the world after finishing their degrees. That was in 1986, just a year after I also made my first overseas trip, and their first stop was the same as mine: Hong Kong. But their plan was braver than mine:

We’d purchased an obscure budget guidebook, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, published by a bunch of hippies calling themselves Lonely Planet

How things change! In any case, they landed in Hong Kong, aged 21, with no experience of the world, and a determination to visit China and a bunch of other places they’d seen on a map in their local IHOP. The result, a couple of decades later, is Gilmore’s new book Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven: A Memoir.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

Fortunately, this is not just a tale of two college girls discovering themselves as they discover the world. If Gilmore had written it back then, no doubt it would have been, but the benefit of hindsight is a great thing (not just to see that those Lonely Planet hippies went on to great success!). Gilmore and her companion intend to circumnavigate the globe, but instead they spend a couple of months exploring China, meeting locals and experiencing Chinese life as it was barely known to Westerners back then. And then a few things go wrong – which make for a very interesting story. It’s a great read for would-be travelers and have-been travelers alike.
photo credit: yeowatzup

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

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One of my favorite gifts for armchair travelers is the annual compilation of travel stories put out by the people at Travelers’ Tales, and The Best Travel Writing 2009: True Stories From Around the World lives up to my expectations.

Best Travel Writing 2009

As with every edition of The Best Travel Writing, the tales come from a variety of destinations across the globe. Far-flung, exotic locations include Antarctica, Cameroon and Mongolia, but as is pointed out in the book’s preface, a lot of travelers have found themselves forced by the economic downturn to look for their travel thrills closer to home, and appropriately, there are also experiences from Colorado, Texas and Minnesota. The stories come from a range of travel writers, but this edition includes a few staple greats like Pico Iyer, Rolf Potts and Jeff Greenwald.

Stories vary from serious to hilarious, or are even both. One of the simplest but most entertaining stories is Susan Van Allen’s contribution “That’s Amore”, about her experiences of flirting with the local men in Italy, and how this behavior has changed over recent decades. And there’s much, much more – The Best Travel Writing 2009 is a great book to dip into whenever an attack of wanderlust strikes.
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This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: The Best Travel Writing 2009

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Burma, also known as Myanmar, is usually in the headlines to highlight its democratic problems and the struggle of Aung San Suu Kyi, and there are some groups which advocate travelers should avoid making visits to Burma. However, for those who decide it’s a good idea to get to know this country better, Elena Jotow and Nicholas Ganz have written Burma: The Alternative Guide. Originally published last year in German, this 2009 English translation is an interesting addition to the relatively small collection of travel guides to Burma.

Burma the Alternative Guide

This book is a combination of useful information and a great collection of color photographs. The first half features descriptions divided up into the different geographical divisions and states of Burma, with details of history and culture and some ideas and suggestions of places travelers can visit, but without providing in-depth visiting information. The second half of the book delves into what the authors describe as the “darker side” of Burma, covering issues including the problem of opium poppy cultivation, and of course the struggle for freedom as the Burmese people fight against the longest ruling military dictatorship in the modern world.

Burma: The Alternative Guide is a great read for either would-be travelers or those who are just interested in the country, but don’t be tricked into thinking that it is a detailed tourist information guide – for trip planning, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
photo credit: antwerpenR

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Burma, The Alternative Guide

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Susan Veness, author of The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World, has something in common with the author of another recent review, Mousejunkies. She also first visited Walt Disney World as a child, and also wasn’t properly captured by the magic until she returned as an adult.

Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World by Susan Veness

Nowadays Veness is firmly hooked and this combined guide book and history of the four theme parks – The Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom – is actually the kind of book you could read for entertainment, not just information. Veness has obviously spent plenty of time exploring these parks (apparently she lives just down the road, which certainly makes it easier) and doesn’t stop at basic hints or tips for visitors. There are interesting snippets of history, “fascinating fact” boxes and maps with useful visiting tips.

An unknown fact that caught my eye, for example, was the fact that the plans for the Japanese pavilion at Epcot originally included a Mount Fuji roller coaster. However, the idea was scrapped, and one of the reasons for this was that the major sponsor, Kodak, didn’t want visitors being reminded of their competitor, Fuji Film! These kinds of tidbits are littered throughout Hidden Magic and make it a more than worthwhile read.

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World

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Fun on Foot in New York, by Warwick and Nola Ford, has a long but informative subtitle: “The runners’ and walkers’ guide to New York City and its surrounds in New York State and New Jersey”. This basically sums up exactly what this book is about.

The introductory section of Fun on Foot gives useful background information, which even includes detailed crime statistics if you’re worried about the safety of jogging in the streets of New York City, and information and maps for the New York City Marathon.

The remaining ten chapters take the reader through different regions of New York City, New York state and New Jersey. Each chapter gives details and maps of eight or nine different running routes. Photographs help runners check that they are on the right track. Each chapter concludes with a list of running clubs found in the area.

Whether you’re visiting New York or its surrounds and want to know some convenient routes for a jog or a walk, or are a resident who’s keen to discover some new paths for exercise, you will find Fun on Foot delivers what it promises – although getting out there and actually running is up to you.
photo credit: Diego_3336

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Fun on Foot in New York

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Pulse Guides recently started a Night + Day series of guide books and one of their first was Joyce-Ann Gatsoulis’s Night + Day Athens. The goal behind the Night + Day books, which are part of the Cool Cities Series, is to provide travelers with not only the typical daytime sights to see, but also to provide some good tips for enjoying the evenings, and as far as this Athens guide is concerned, they’ve done well.

Joyce-Ann Gatsoulis Night + Day Athens Guide

If you haven’t got too much time for pre-trip reading and research, then the first section of this guide will help you out. It describes the “99 Best of Athens” – three picks for each of three categories. You can find the top three for things like art spaces, dance clubs by the sea, romantic dining, ouzeries, souvlaki places and even sushi restaurants.

There’s more detail in the rest of the guide with a series of three-day itineraries depending on how you want to experience Athens: the classic way, the hip and cool version, the downtown way or the by-the-water version, with information for shopping, hotels, restaurants, nightlife and sightseeing attractions. And if you’re like me and consider the best parts of Greece are actually outside of Athens, then the “Leaving Athens” section will be useful too – it has information on how to enjoy historic towns like Delphi and Olympia or romantic islands like Santorini or Mykonos.
photo credit: Panoramas

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Night + Day Athens

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Travels through Africa tend to make for fascinating travel narratives because the depths of Africa are usually places that fewer of us get to – and for that reason alone Tahir Shah’s In Search of King Solomon’s Mines: A Quest in Ethiopia is already a great armchair travel story. The premise, too, is a great start: Shah come across “an inky hand-drawn map hung on the back wall of Ali Baba’s Tourist Emporium” in Jerusalem’s Old City, and when the shopkeeper explains it is a treasure map leading to King Solomon’s mines, the quest is on.

With research into old folklore and the experiences of travelers in bygone eras, Shah sets off to Ethiopia. Things start badly when a rabid guide dog bites him shortly after he arrives, but then the real search beings. And while the search gives a goal to the trip, the story is really in the local people that Shah meets along the way. A great set of photos in the middle of the book introduce the reader visually to some of these interesting people. But if you want to know if Shah’s quest ends up in a real gold mine, you’ll have to read the book yourself.
photo credit: Marc Veraart

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

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There are plenty of Disney World guides out there – and some people would argue that a theme park visitor doesn’t really need to read a whole guide book before a visit – but at least Bill Burke’s Mousejunkies! Tips, Tales and Tricks for a Disney World Fix makes the tips and tricks entertaining – and it’s been put out by the reliably-interesting publisher, Travelers’ Tales.

Burke first visited Walt Disney World as a kid in 1981, and loved it as all normal kids do, but he didn’t get back there again for almost two decades. In 1998 he flew down to Florida with his wife, and the vacation started badly – but turned out well in the end and started off Burke’s Disney addiction. Burke goes on to introduce some fellow “Mousejunkies”, who feature throughout the rest of the book with some of their personal tips.

There is some standard guide book style information in this book, but it’s introduced most often as part of an anecdote or past Disney travel experience, so it’s very readable. There are, however, also some slightly mind-boggling tables about the costs for various parts of a Disney experience and how they vary from season to season. Chapters on hotels, restaurants and the various rides and attractions give you very detailed information on how to get the best experience, although for me, the overwhelming feeling I’m left with is that these Mousejunkies have spent far too much time at Disney World!

This post originally came from Kathika Travel Blog. Stop by and read our most popular travel blog posts.

Book Review: Mousejunkies!

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