Customer Reviews

Pointing The Way - By: K. Sweeney, 07 Aug 2008
The Lonely Planet guides all share similar pros & cons, the main cons being thatin the age of the up-to-the-minute Internet listings for hotels & places to eat & such are largely irrelevant; by the time the book is published these are going to be out of date. In Thailand, where businesses boom & bust like mushrooms, this is doubly so.
What these guides are good for is pointing the way, as a starting place for your own explorations of peoples, places & cultures, with the many helpful overviews & maps of areas interspersed with tips on local habits & customs, as well as detailing the must-do tourist bits.
Thailand is ably represented here, & this would have received four stars except for the way the "seedier" side of the tourist industry was represented; like it or not, this is a large part of Thailand's recent history, a leftover from American R&R during the Vietnam war, &in this guide it is brushed asidein a few paragraphs that only illuminated the author's personal predjudicesin an ugly display of cultural imperialism.