Alternative to Travel Guide Books

I like to be innovative. I like to try to do things the fastest, easiest, most efficient way possible. When you are traveling efficiency and functionality are really important. If you have your whole life on your back you don’t have room for, as Wade says, “Big, dumb and heavy things.” More and more I am finding my Guide books to be big dumb and heavy.

I first began using guide books when I started to travel with Wade. In some instances they can be helpful. In some instances they can be a headache. My beef with them is that they have too much unnecessary information. They are chock full of things I will never read and never utilize, which makes them extremely thick and heavy. For me, all I usually use are the maps, hotels guides, and transportation guides. I want a guide book with just these bare minimum things. The rest I think I can do on my own.

My second problem has been that they are often times completely wrong. The Lonely Planet China guide book has led me astray more times than I can count on both hands. In Shang Hai it pointed me to a ferry ticket office that probably hadn’t been in use for at least 10 years. In Qing Dao it said I would arrive at a train station that was completely demolished, and instead I was at some weird train station not on any map in the middle of nowhere shadyville on the outskirts of the city.

The Costa Rica Lonely Planet once took me to a town which they described as a haven for hiking and rafting. Yet upon arrival there were no places to hike and the river was a trickling stream of green, murky water, clogged with mounds of trash. To top it off, a previous Lonely Planet guide book writer has just published a book bragging about how he wrote a guide book for somewhere in South America while sitting in his apartment in California. This makes me distrust guidebooks. I do not want to spend $25 USD on another Lonely Planet only to have it be constantly wrong AND I have to carry the darn heavy thing around.

So with all this said I am trying my hardest to find ways around this burden.

The internet is a tool potentially resourceful for a traveler in this day of age. I am looking for ways to use it, useful websites, which will by-pass my need for the travel guide book. There are hundreds of websites that now list hostels and hotels for almost every city in the world. Many of them even give detailed directions on how to find the hotel and maps. Andy from hobotraveler.com is developing a website with a database of hotels in every town or city in the entire world, hobohideout.com. So now as long as I have access to the internet, which with internet cafes worldwide I do, I do not have to rely on a guide book to find a hotel.

Wade (and sometimes I) is trying to compile a sort of online guide book to many of the places we travel to, vagabond field notes. We think this will be useful to travelers. We try to put the cheapest and best hotels and restaurants, maps, and basically the bare minimum of what a traveler really NEEDS. No frills.

(Photo of the Taiwan Lonely Planet from the library and photocopies of the book)

And if you really must have a printed version of a guidebook, and worst comes to worst, there is one more thing you can do. Find a guidebook in the library and photocopy it. I just did this for Taiwan. My local library has Lonely Planets, Frommers, and an assortment of other types of guidebooks all waiting for me for free. I know I will not be traveling to all of the cities in Taiwan, and I leave myself to my own abilities if I do, but for the places I definitely will be, I can copy the necessary information from the guidebook, and basically fashion my own guidebook with only the stuff I will NEED.

I am always looking for the best, most efficient way to do things. I need an alternative to lugging around huge Lonely Planets chock full of useless information.