Lonely Planet Vietnam (Country Guide)
2011 March 18
Lonely Planet Vietnam (Country Guide)
Encounter the best of Planet Vietnam Lonely. Our 10th Situation is complete of sensible info that you see the sunset from a junk on Halong Bay, sucking back road in Hanoi Bia Hoi, or collective bargaining as one particular born in Ho Chi Minh City in no time. This guidebook: Comprehensive routes into seashores, food, Ho Chi Minh Highway & more. Extensive information on every small thing from food & language into wellbeing & transport. Total-color part on the mountain peoples in Vietnam.
List Value: $ 24.99
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Lonely Planet Vietnam 9 — LP’s best try yet,
For the first-time visitor to Vietnam, Lonely Planet’s Vietnam 9 overall is a fine production — and is easily Lonely Planet’s best swing at Vietnam — even if the style police are trying to ruin the show.
Vietnam 9 covers all the big-ticket destinations comprehensively, with detailed sleeping, eating, drinking and sights information. There’s a detailed orientation section, loads of maps, crystal clear photos and lots of general information. Good coverage on most of the border crossings is included and the transportation information is pretty easy to digest — if a little confusing at times. A series of suggested itineraries, while not overly imaginative, remain useful for first time travellers.
Authors Nick Ray, Peter Dragicevich and Regis St Louis have done the hard yards and crammed much of what Vietnam has to offer into Lonely Planet’s famously tight word-limits. They’ve done a great job putting together what is a probably the most comprehensive text available and something much improved on Vietnam 8.
Listings
Guesthouse and hotel listings are concise and all budgets are well covered. There were some omissions which struck me as odd — Mai House on Phu Quoc, Tay Ho Hotel in Can Tho, Jungle Beach north of Nha Trang, Hoa Hong in Da Nang and the Tung Trang in Hanoi — all outstanding places, yet none made the cut. That said, there are stacks of excellent places they do mention — more than enough for most readers. For the rest you’ll just need to read http://www.travelfish.org. ;
Sights-wise, the information is excellent. Lots of historical background and interesting snippets are woven into the text, acting as leads for the reader to learn more. For example Ong Pagoda in Tra Vinh includes a reference to the Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms for more information on the pagoda’s god Quan Cong.
Transport
Transportation comes in two parts — a summary and the destination specific sections throughout.
The summary section is good though a little unbalanced. There are almost three pages about getting a flight to Vietnam (surely something fairly simple), yet almost no information about the niche topic of buying a motorbike — certainly an area where advice and suggestions would be useful. The train section has the briefest of fare charts, but thankfully steers people to the Man in Seat Sixty-One website (www.seat61.com) which is a far better resource.
The destination specific sections vary. In particular better information regarding frequency of bus services would have been good. There are also some discrepancies — the Qui Nhon to Pakse bus service is listed as taking 12 hours and costing 250,000 VND, yet in Pleiku it reads “There is also an international service linking Pleiku and Attapeu (US$10, 12 hours)”. This error (Qui Nhon to Pakse is at least twice the distance of Pleiku to Attapeu) is repeated in the transport introduction. Perhaps if one of the writers had actually done the trip they’d know that Attapeu to Kon Tum takes about five hours and another two hours to Pleiku, while the Qui Nhon to Pakse trip can take up to 20 hours. Of course these errors can happen to anyone — I’m sure there are some in Travelfish — but hey, LP has a bigger editing team than us.
Text and design
Talking about editing, the text is dense and the writing dry, verging on encyclopaedic. I’ve met a number of the LP writers over the years and without fail they’ve been a much more interesting, amusing and verbose lot than this text would have you believe. Perhaps the editors could spin the dial back a little on their “textual-de-emotionaliser device” to let the occasional witty or cheeky line slip through.
And while I’m on the topic of the back-end — there’s a new layout, and this one isn’t great. A step forward is the removal of “Author’s choice” aka the Lonely Planet Touch of Death — replaced by a small “our pick” icon. A step backwards is the ordering of accommodation by price rather than quality. In this nod to the serial penny-pinchers, the rest of us are left scratching our head thinking “So which one do they recommend?”.
Fact boxes though are the real blight. Vietnam 9 saw its length increased from 524 to 540 pages, yet rather than bulking out destinations, there are now more than 100 shaded fact boxes. Of course, some are useful; “Tracking the American War”, tying together various sections covering war interests, is great. But half a page dedicated to Regis St Louis’s motorbike breaking down is excessive — especially when there’s but a lone paragraph dedicated to trekking out of Kon Tum. Minor point perhaps, but the designers should have their cookie-jar benefits suspended for the incorrectly typeset, mistakenly padded fact box on page 163 — sloppy.
Call me old school, but a move back to the basics — accurate and easy to use information — would be…
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|Useful, but too may descriptions done-in-a-rush!,
Revised April 14, 2010
Kindle edition of LP Vietnam
Authors so rushed their research that they failed to visit many of the sights for the 2009 edition. As a result, descriptions are sometimes far off the mark. In the Hanoi section, for example, Quan Thanh Temple is said to be “on the shores of Truc Bach Lake,” but if you walk along the lake shore you won’t see the temple because it is a block south of the lake! The misleading description of Hanoi’s excellent History Museum may put you off with “A must for the architecture more than the collection…” as may the comments about revolutionary history, but if the authors had visited the museum in recent years they would have found a very well laid-out and labeled collection of Vietnam’s history up to about 1945. The revolutionary history has been moved north across the street to the Museum of the Vietnamese Revolution, which is actually very comprehensive and well displayed; here too, the book’s description of this museum is flawed.
Lesser used borders, called “Border Blues” are poorly described. Any place to change money, accommodations, restaurants? Road conditions? It’s difficult to tell from the descriptions. I’ve used the Nam Xoi-Na Meo and Nong Haet-Nam Can crossings into Vietnam, traveling on a bicycle, without any problems. It’s silly to call these and Nam Phao-Cau Treo the “Border Blues” when they are perfectly fine as lesser-used crossings. Through buses are available to those who wish to reduce transport hassles.
Maps are generally very good, one of LP’s strong points.
I used the Kindle edition of this guide, which works well and has enlarged segments of each map. Of course the paper edition is more convenient, but the weightlessness of the Kindle version is great to have.
I wish that Lonely Planet would be more emphatic about authors visiting EVERY sight for each edition to catch the changes. Too often authors assume that nothing has changed and skip a visit to a sight without knowing that the original description was wrong.
Best to take a look at the competition before buying this guidebook!
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