A Little Light Reading–Moon and Rough Guides vs. Footprint and Lonely Planet (24 days to go!)
Things have settled down a bit recently. We found a new roommate to take over our room in the shared house starting May 15 (he’s already paid us back our deposit and he’s given Angela 1 1/2 months’ rent). We’ve packed all of our stuff that we won’t be using for the next 4 days, so it’s all ready to go to Steve’s mom’s house for storage. One of Steve’s friends is going to take Elizabeth (our cat) for the year that we’re gone. Everything is really coming together. The only things left on our to-do list before we leave is to cancel Netflix (which I’ll do right before we take off), and I need to change over all of my mailing info to Laura’s house (we’ve already put in a change of address at the post office, but I want to change things directly, too). Things are becoming more and more real all of the time. I’m a little bit in shock that this is actually going to happen. Steve and I are really about to leave for a year long trip around the world. It’s been a year of planning for a year of fun! But I think it’ll all be worth it and then some. I think the reality of the trip is really setting in now in part because we have more free time to read the Peru and Ecuador travel books that we bought. We’ve both been spending our evenings lying in bed with the kitty, reading the books and sharing information–dreaming and planning. We still plan on winging most of the trip with the help of the guidebooks and people we meet along the way. But we have to plan our bus route and where we’re going to stop from Lima to Cusco in order to arrive in time to get acclimatized before our Machu Picchu trek. So, that part of the trip is really coming together in terms of what we want to see and do and how long it’s going to take so that we make sure to arrive on time. But I’m not going to share our plans just yet–you’ll have to just check back in to see what adventures we’re having. But I do want to write a bit about our travel book choices. From what I can tell the four main travel books are: Moon, Rough Guides, Footprint, and Lonely Planet (there are many others that cater to different demographics–like Frommer’s seems more for more expensive trips, and the Let’s Go! series seems to be more for college kids). After talking with people at various bookstores (including a cool travel bookstore in San Francisco whose name has escaped me), we decided that Moon and Rough Guides would be better choices for us. Lonely Planet, while usually touted as a backpacker’s bible, didn’t seem to give enough information on the places we wanted to go to. It seems that Europe is pretty well covered, but we won’t be there until the end of the trip. At first we had a Footprint Peru book, but after a few days of reading it, both of us were disappointed. It gave little information on specific places and even less general information about how to get from place to place. I was also really turned off by the advertisements. I just don’t feel like I can trust a travel writer to be objective about a place if they’ve placed an ad in the book.Now we have a Moon book for Peru and a Rough Guides book for Ecuador (which was really a pain to get ahold of). We both especially love the Moon book for Peru. It has loads of information on things to see, places to stay–including price range and room condition and amenities, and how to get from place to place. It’s really given us both a sense of what to expect and has been a big help in the planning we’ve been doing from home.The Rough Guides book for Ecuador is also good, but it just doesn’t feel quite as informative as the Moon book for Peru. But we still really like it. Both books give lots of background information on the country and general tips about safety, food, health, etc….We won’t really know how good either of these books are until after we’ve been to the places. But I feel a lot more comfortable with them than I ever did with the Footprint book.These are all, of course, my opinions (and opinions of travel book store workers I’ve spoken to). I haven’t looked at the Lonely Planet books in depth at all. I remember the one I took with me to Italy, and I didn’t feel like it was very helpful then, which in a lot of ways colored my opinion now.
Tags: Footprint, guide books, Lonely Planet, Moon, Pre-Trip Planning, Rough Guides
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