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Summary: A law student's take after a great June week in Iceland!
Review: Lonely Planet Iceland was great. From the book, my friends and I found lodging, night clubs and countless BEAUTIFUL sites. We even tried the rotten shark that the book so luridly describes. (It is as bad as the book says, I might add.) Iceland is a rugged and beautiful place. With this book, I was able to get to most of the wonderful sites without major problems. I can only think of a few times when I needed to consult an outside source for additional information: once to find out where I could get some shark and a couple of other times for directions (Iceland's system of roads is predictably often quite spartan). I guess the best thing I can say for this book is I am going to South Africa in one month and I just bought the Lonely Planet South Africa. I just remembered one more thing that the book does not have: Icelandair's Internet deals are great. Check them out! If you are going to Iceland, I am jealous! Have fun!
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Summary: Top-notch guide for adventurous travelers
Review: Since 1999, I have been to Iceland twice and Greenland twice, for a total of seven weeks--extremely unusual for an American. Those trips included extended excursions by bicyle, backpack, and cross-country ski, with some bus excursions as well. Throughout, this book was my primary guide. I found it reliable and an extremely good source of inspiration, particularly for hikes. I cite my own experience because I clearly fall into the target readership for this book. Car travelers aren't the intended audience, and may be disappointed. This book presumes (as do I, even at age 49) that the best way to see Iceland is afoot, a-pedal, or on one of that nation's wonderful backcountry bus routes. If you're not prepared to carry a backpack onto or off of the buses, you'll probably prefer another guidebook. My main quibble is with the maps, which were hard to locate when I wanted them, and not very detailed. But you can get great maps in Reykjavik, so that's only a minor problem.
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Summary: You need this book when you go to the Faroes or Iceland !
Review: This is a very good reference for anyone going to the Faroe Islands or Iceland (I don't know for Greenland). It describes any tiny place and it tells you exactly what is there to see and to do and it tells you where you have to go and where you don't have to go. It gives you the good addresses for restaurants or bars. You can look up any place that you can find on a map and LP tells you if it's worthwile visiting. You even learn a lot of things about the parts of the Faroes and Iceland that are not yet known among tourists. There are a lot of books for sale about Iceland, but I think this is one of the only good guides to the Faroe Islands.
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Summary: Outdated, unhelpful and prejudiced
Review: This is the last Lonely Planet guide I bought; this is to say that I will never buy a Lonely Planet again. You would expect your guidebook to be accurate and provide information that you are likely to require on your trip. This book manages to fail miserably on both counts. I bought this guide before travelling to Iceland. Begin from the beginning, and wonders never cease. In common with other Lonely Planet guides, this book is charmingly ten years behind the times where travel costs and flight options are concerned: author Deanna Swaney gives plenty of irrelevant information about costliest scheduled flights. I have got news for you, Deanna: there is this thing called "the Internet". Nowadays, trip to Iceland with low-cost airlines costs little more than a nice restaurant meal for two. "Your plane ticket will probably be the single most expensive item in your budget," Ms Swaney says. It will sure be, if you follow her incompetent advice. Let us move on. The section on visas suggests Eastern European citizens need a visa to visit Iceland. This is not true. Most of them have enjoyed visa-free travel to Iceland for about a decade now. Now sort out your travel money (if, that is, you have something left in your wallet after buying your ticket Swaney-style). The book writes extensively about such anachronisms as travellers' cheques, eurocheques and postal cheques (when did you last hear of these being used?), but is it not simplier to pay by credit card, since these are accepted absolutely everywhere. Even Deanna noted, in her twisted style, that Icelanders are "plastic mad" - to her, anything more modern than abacus reeks of insanity. And ATMs are everywhere, not "only in banks". If you are one of those crazy people using what is known as "mobile phones", rest assured they work fine in Iceland, but Ms Swaney ii yet to learn about their existence. To her, "public phone offices", coins and cards are the things to use. Another handy tip on spending twice as much as you need to. My personal favourite was Car Rental section in "Getting Around". Listen to this: "Even the Sultan of Brunei would think twice before hiring a car in Iceland." I shopped around and a major rental company offered me a car for roughly an average European price. The truth is, Swaney simply hates all those car-renting, credit-card-carrying gold-amexed yuppies whose "encroaching" onslaught she esaped in Alaska. Because of her ideological resistance to individual car travel, as opposed to buses, hitch-hiking, biking and other types of politically correct anti-capitalist mobility, the author chose to provide zero information about parking in Reykjavik. This would be some practical information I could use - without the benefit of speaking Icelandic I wanted to know what parking signs and parking meter instructions mean. Now that I mentioned the language, let me quote this to you: "One thing to remember is that proper names are declined as well as common nouns. This can lead to a great deal of confusion." Yes, Ms Swaney, but could you name one language which declines common nouns and leaves proper names intact? Perhaps if you were a bit more knowledgeable there would be no need to be confused. I could go on and on. Maps are primitive and unhelpful, but no different from elsewhere in the series. Descriptions of places are poorly researched and incomplete (I looked in vain for a mention of Blue Lagoon, a very impressixe spa complex near Keflavik). There is, however, some rabid anti-American hysteria about NATO military base (surely Ms Swaney would have no problem if there were Russian troops stationed in Iceland, but now the poor country, "pressurized" into becoming NATO's founding member, has to endure humiliating presence of "yankees"). Is there one thing that is good in this book, you may ask? Oh yes, the section about alcohol. To Ms Swaney, so pressing is the need for alcoholic intoxication, that she made an exception in her own rules and researched the subject matter in depth. Booze shop opening hours, brands and their alcohol content are meticulously listed, including ABV Pilsner, which, according to Deanna, "packs about as much punch as lemonade and can't be drunk faast enough to have any effect" - and that effect you will need if you are stuck with this book.
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Summary: A true survival guide
Review: We used this book to plan our trip to both Iceland and Greenland, and found it invaluable. We used it to phone and e-mail for reservations, which were not always possible to make, as LP also tells us, because of no English spoken at some of the tiny places. We trusted LP that little hostels existed in these places, however, and always found room. The maps were great, including hiking trails. The historical details were well-researched. The directions were amazing. It even got us to one historical site in Iceland that had no signs and even the locals had a hard time telling us how to find. Besides being practically helpful, it has lots of anecdotes and local flavour that make it interesting reading. Perhaps what should be emphasized more is how expensive Iceland is. Two small loads of laundry cost us about $35 Canadian! We could have bought all new underwear for that!
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Summary: Be aware of the agenda
Review: While this travel gudie does cover Iceland in detail, one needs to be careful to note that lonely planet does have their own agenda. Many of the hotels they reccommend over other establishments are not the best accomodations. Their may even be other hotels in the area where they say there are no other places to stay. And from a guide in the west fjords, some of their contact information as well as their descriptions may be far off.
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