Leave the travel guide at home and still benefit
Travel guides are often a point of contention; should you or shouldn’t you take one? I personally choose to use them, Lonely Planet’s in particular, but only as a point of reference. When arriving in a new destination, the maps and recommended accommodation lists can prove to be very useful, especially when you don’t arrive until late in the day. Although often out of date, the general information on sights and local attractions can also be handy.
Apart from a few weeks travelling through Italy, France and Spain several years ago, my trips have usually only been to a single country at a time. Taking a travel guide on those trips wasn’t an issue as I only needed one, but in preparation for travelling around the world I have accumulated quite a few travel guide books. The size and weight of all of them is considerable, there is no way that I am taking any of them with me.
Lonely Planet have recently started to offer PDF versions of their travel guides. You can buy them by the chapter at their online store. If I had known about this before I bought the printed copies I probably would have gone for that option, but I’m not paying for the same thing twice. Something that I would like to see in the future is the option to pay a little extra for the book and get an ebook version along with it. My favourite tech book publisher has offered this for a while and it has proven to be very beneficial. I like being able to flick through a book or to read it away from the computer, but the ability to have the content with you anywhere and have the option to search it is fantastic.
My plan for getting the benefits of a travel guide without the burden of carrying them is a travel guide redaction; I’m extracting the parts that I think will be useful. I have marked the destinations in each book that I plan to visit and then removed the useful sections. This process has resulted in reducing a 1200 page travel guide down to just 40 pages. Scanning the travel guides is also an option, but doing so would be a breach of the copyright but it would mean that you wouldn’t be carrying around any books or paper unnecessarily as you could just print the pages as and when you needed them.
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It's not a bad idea, but you'd need to have a very good idea of where you're going to make sure you don't leave any of the bits at home!
One option I've used in the past when I've wanted to travel particularly light is to summarise the important bits I REALLY need into a single document and print that off. I did a three week trip in southern Vietnam a couple of years back and my only "resource" was two A4 sheets worth of condensed info. Took me probably 4-5 hours to put it all together but then no books to lug around and the info was all I needed.
Hi,
For my current travels around Europe I bought the Lonely Planet's 'Europe on a budget'. It's a great book as it summerises all european countries and provides maps of the major cities. I wonder if there's a similar version for your destinations.
If I'd known you could get them online I may have done that instead as the book cost me £30 from a shop in Spain (not quite a 'budget' book!)
Anyway having the book (or printed pages) has been good, especially when you get lost in a new city.
Enjoy!
Chris
@Stuart – I know where I'm going in India and China as my time is limited in both. For other countries in SE Asia I'm just taking the accommodation bits for the cities.
@Chris – South East Asia on a shoestring is one of the books that I have bought.
i've heard good things about lonely planet!
You could always buy the lonely planet guides/phrases books as iphone apps — if you had an iphone that is. Looks pretty useful.
What the guidebooks need to do is start selling their books as Kindle books. There is a woefully small number of Kindle travel guides.
@Joe – World Nomads actually do a range of free language guides for the ipod.
@Akila – I think I'd prefer a PDF on my netbook. A kindle is yet another gadget to carry about