Frommer's China

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good, but lacking in some important areas...
Review: I bought this book because it was the most recently published travel guide on Beijing at the time (Dec '03). I have been living in Beijing for 3 months and have been to several of the places the book recommends. The facts in it are usually accurate; some prices, restaurant names, and phone numbers have changed since the book was published.

My main qualm with this book is the referencing... it is completely inconvenient. First of all, the Chinese characters of location names are listed in the back of the book, instead of with the desriptions (like most books). This makes is difficult to show people the characters of the place you are looking for if you're lost.

Also, if you are looking at one of the book's maps, and want to find out more about a certain location, there is no page reference. You have to look the place up in the index and then flip to the description.

Similarly, there are no map references in the sight-descriptions. (The book has several maps.) You have to guess which map the place would be on, based on the very basic directions given in the description. This can be a pain!!!

Otherwise, the book proved useful. My friends that had the Lonely Planet guide said that is was much less acurate than my book. Also check out Let's Go when deciding which book to buy.

I bought this book, Frommers Beijing, and Frommers Shanghai. Altogether they were pretty useful, but had a lot of repeating info between the main book and the city guides.

Rating:
Summary: Great, but leave the Shanghai section at home
Review: I took Frommer's China 1st Edition on a brief visit to China 4 weeks ago. As time was short, I needed all the help I could get to see as much as possible.

The Southeast section was accurate, clear and entertaining. I travelled easily from Xiamen up the coast, seeing recommended areas on the way to Shanghai. Peter Neville-Hadley's directions were detailed and spot-on in every area.

However, the Shangai section was a disappointment. I wasted a lot of valuable time trying to find sites. Directions such as 'walk a few blocks southwest of the Bund' are useless. Street names, please, with the nearest metro station indicated, not vague red dots stuck on an out-of-date map. My conclusion was that the writer of this section had no knowledge of Chinese and had not been in Shanghai for many years.

Looking through other sections which covered areas I had visited on previous visits suggest that the other chapters are as accurate as the southeast section. So use this book, but cut out the Shanghai section before you leave home.

Rating:
Summary: I think tenley peterson is looking at a different book
Review: My copy of this title has the Chinese in large, useful characters right next to the maps. Only if there's no map for a small town is the Chinese listed in the back, with the information for each town handily grouped together in alphabetical order.

And like every other guide book, the map for a town is in the middle of the text talking about that town. So what's hard to find? The hotels and places to see are right next to the map in most cases. And since the towns only have one map, what's to guess about which maps things are on?

I don't know about the Beijing and Shanghai guides, but of course there will be a lot of repeated information. The sights don't change, after all. The best place to eat is the same. Bus 47 still runs the same route. Of course lots of the information is the same. What do you expect?

But what I do agree on is that this books is waaaaay more accurate than any other I looked at. I'm no fan of the usual schmaltzy Frommer's style, but this book really tells it like it is. It has the most extensive, detailed and accurate practical information of any guide I've seen, including the do-it-yourself budget guides.

And while we're on the topic of Chinese, note that for every recommended restaurant there are recommended dishes, and the characters for them are given so you can just point to them to order. There's also a good long list of Chinese favourites you can buy anywhere.

And while the major destinations are covered, this guide also scores with some remote rural destinations I've not seen covered anywhere else, including LP. Even if you don't want to go there, it's fascinating to read about the real China away from the regular tourist routes.

You know, the first thing you want to check out when you buy a guide is the author biogs. Most of the writers on this guide speak Chinese and have lived in China. It really shows. All the LP and Rough guide readers were borrowing my copy all the time and making notes.

Rating:
Summary: Woefully inadequate
Review: We just took a trip to China, and brought this book as our primary guide. In the store it looked like the best of the bunch, full of details, lots of info to help us find a hotel and get prepped for the trip, but once we got there it was not useful at all.

Our biggest problem was the lack of Chinese characters for any of the places. We took taxis most places, and they would look at the pinyin (romanized) names and addresses in the descriptions section and either not understand or flat out refuse to take us. It was VERY FRUSTRATING not having the Chinese characters, and not having the Chinese addresses. We later realized that the characters for the names were on the map pages, however not all places were on the map, and the full addresses and Chinese street names weren't listed, so it still wasn't what we needed. Not only that but the maps were hard to find, as they were buried in the middle of the descriptions and we kept flipping past them. Even after I'd dog-eared them.

Secondly, once we got out of Beijing, most of the information was way out of date, or flat out wrong! For instance, we went to Kunming, and the first restaurant we tried to go to wasn't there anymore, and the other restaurant had the wrong address! Fortunately our taxi driver figured out it was talking about a vegetarian restaurant that was nearby. At that point I was extremely glad we had a Chinese speaker with us! Otherwise we would have never found it. Not only that, but when we tried to go to the Stone Forest, it recommended to take the train, but the train they mention apparently doesn't run anymore, and the ticket-seller told us that the other train (later in the day) was a really bad option, very slow, and that we should take the bus. We ended up hiring a car for the day.

The only thing we ended up using (successfully) from our trip to Kunming was the location of the internet cafe. It was China Telcom, and so not likely to change, and even so the only reason we found it was because it was near the post office, which (unlike the cafe) was listed on the map.

It's also worth noting that the hotel we stayed at in Beijing, which was absolutley wonderful, the guide said wasn't worth our money. Fortunately we had our friend to go scope out nice places ahead of time for us (we wanted something really nice, as it was our anniversary), and after looking at about six places, she decided the Grand Hotel Beijing, with a view of the Forbidden City, was the nicest, even though the guide didn't recommend it. That and the St. Regis, whose location wasn't as good for being a tourist. It turned out our hotel was one of "the" hotels to stay at in Beijing, and got all kinds of positive comments from her Chinese friends. Go figure.

All in all I was very dissapointed with this guide. We got sick of being led to places that either didn't exist or had the wrong address listed, and after a while our friend who spoke Chinese refused to even use it, and we went and found a local travel agency everywhere we went. I don't know what we would have done if she hadn't been there, since hardly anyone in Kunming spoke good English.