I love a guidebook.
My guidebook series of choice has always been the Rough Guides. I’m partial to the maps of museums and other sites of interest (the map of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was an absolute godsend, or I might still be lost in its halls) and historical and cultural notes. On the other hand, Marc prefers the Lonely Planet series, and I admit that these sometimes have the edge over the Rough Guides in terms of locating accommodation and dining. We usually travel with one of each, allowing Marc to find dinner and me to anoint myself as our unofficial tour guide.
Our usual isn’t going to cut it for our trip to Africa. For one, our rough plan will take us through perhaps 15 countries, and carting around 30 guidebooks between the two of us is just a hilarious idea. When we traveled through Southeast Asia in 2008, I carted the Rough Guide to each Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia (not to mention some pages I surgically excised from an old Rough Guide to Southeast Asia), and that was almost too much to carry around. (Marc took a much more reasonable approach with a single copy of the Lonely Planet Southeast Asia on a Shoestring.) Continue reading The Guidebook Question
