Lonely Planet Baja California & Los Cabos (Regional Guide)
Discover Baja California & Los Cabos
Commune with whale calves as their mothers nudge them to the surface for their very first breath.
Get dusty on the badder-than-bad backroad to Bahia San Luis Gonzaga.
Suck down a caguama (that’s Baja for beer) as you watch the sun set in Punta Abreojos.
Discover the delectable truth behind Baja’s world-renowned invention, the Caesar salad.
In This Guide:
4872 miles, one black-widow spider bite, one superstar author still kicking, and 30 pages fo the best damn maps anywhere.
Special surfing chapter written by none other than Surfer magazine editor Jake Howard – charge on!
Mi Querida Baja California feature revealing the lives of a painter, a doctor and a few more local experts.
And, since you asked for it – we’ve incorporated more off-track coverage than any other guidebook.
List Price: $ 19.99
Price: $ 84.49
Easily Readable But Lacking Correct Information,
My wife and me chose this LP guide for our recent trip to Baja Norte. I actually enjoyed Palmerlee’s writing style and his side commentaries on the Baja music scene and other topics of interest. However, there were just too many cases of inaccurate information. For example, Palmerlee says a taxi from Ensenada to La Bufadora is about $12 when actually the round trip cost given to us by numerous taxi drivers was $40. He then says (correctly) that you can save money by taking a $1 bus to the town of Maneadora. But from there, he says, you must hitchhike to La Bufadora. The truth is, as we discovered by talking to the locals, you can easily catch another $1 bus from Maneadero to La Bufadora. Thus avoiding the hitchhiking which many people, including my wife, would not want to try.
Another problem was that the hotel recommendations were too often off the the mark. For example, at the highly recommended Hotel Los Pelicanos in Rosarito we were taken to a dark, dreary room by a very unfriendly hotel receptionist. Of course, we chose not to stay there.
I know that prices change and good places go bad. But still this book just had too many inaccuracies for me to recommend it. In fact, my wife started saying we should read what the Lonely Planet guide said and then do the opposite. I think this was probably a bit of an overstatement on her part. But still I’m sure this is the last thing LP wants to hear from it’s readers. By the way, Lonely Planet is still my favorite publisher of travel guides. But hopefully the book we purchase for our next trip will provide better information.
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|Practical and fun,
Lonely Planet’s Baja book is an excellent guide to the peninsula. I especially appreciated the detailed info on how to get around in Baja. The section on health in the front of the book came in handy after a small altercation with a manta ray! It was excellent for travelers on a budget. The descriptions of cities, places to stay and restaurants were all very accurate, but left enough room for our personal tastes to guide us to the spots that seemed especially fitting.
I felt as though once we arrived at our final destination there was a lot more there than was really covered in the book, but I guess they only have so many pages to work with!
This was the only book we brought with us, and it made for a great trip!
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|as comprehensive as a telephone directory…,
… and with about as much personality and selectivity. Like the Moon guide, a very useful book to have once you find yourself in Town X but not very useful for figuring out whether it would be better to plan a trip to Town X versus Town Y.
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