Review of: Korea, Lonely Planet Country Guide, by Rob Whyte

2/5 (minimum 1)

by tom on 22 Nov 2007

Using this guide book confirmed by growing suspicion that the Lonely Planet series has really gone off the boil. I hesitate slightly to rate it bad, because it didn't actively do anything seriously wrong, it was just badly lacking in places. In just a brief trip to Korea staying in just 3 places I noticed some really annoying ommissions and contradictions.

For example, the section on the Myeongdong district of Seoul lists very few eating opportunities, giving you the impression that there are no restaurants in this part of town. This is clearly not the case; if you simply walk around enough you'll find plenty of individual streets crowded with perfectly decent restaurants. The guide doesn't need to list all these, it would just be useful if it flagged up that this was the case. I don't need to be spoon fed; I'd much rather be pointed in the right general direction and take it from there, but the Lonely Planet guide doesn't give you that bigger picture. The one listed restaurant I did visit looked dead and uninspiring compared with other places round the corner, so I walked away and found somewhere else.

Similarly, the section on Gyeongju says that there are two trains a day to Seoul (only two?!). What it doesn't bother to mention is that after a shortish train ride to another town along the way you can pick up the KTX high speed train direct to Seoul, giving you the option of a good ten trains a day. Staff at the station will sell you a through ticket. It would have taken just one more sentence to mention this, but the authors didn't seem to think it was worth it (or didn't bother to do their homework). This gives me the impression of a guide that hasn't really been thoroughly field tested.

In the Health section, one paragraph states that no special vaccinations are required or recommended for Korea, but then one page later it states that all travellers to Korea should be vaccinated against Hepatitis A. So, is this a special vaccination? Is it required or not? This kind of ambiguity is really sloppy.

At a general level I find the layout of the books has now got pretty confusing. In any one section key information about a topic such as transport links may be scattered around different subsections, often leaving me wondering "where did I read that?".

There could also be improvements to the indexes in LP guides in general. One of the first things I want to know when I arrive in any country is whether or not it's safe to drink the tap water. This information is generally embedded in the Health section, but why not put an entry in the index pointing directly to this?

The last few Lonely Planet guides I've bought have all irritated me with these kind of oversights, and the Korea guide is no exception. I'll be thinking hard about buying anymore in the future.

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Korea, Lonely Planet Country Guide, by Rob Whyte

Tags: book guide-book korea lonely-planet tourism travel
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See Also: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Korea-Lonely-Planet-Country-Guide/dp/17410455...