Lonely Planet Guide Book

You definitely should have a guidebook. The info you can get online is hard to find and on any one website incomplete. There's nothing like holding a map of the town in your hand which shows the location of the bus station.

The LP guide has it's problems, but the only real alternative for South America is the Footprint guides. I'd just buy whichever one has the most recent publication date. (All guidebook publishers try to hide the publication date, so you have to dig.)

It looks like Footprints just released a new Chilean guide book. Have you used this? Or, has anyone else?

LP is getting worse and worse every year, that's a fact. For those of us who were using the guidebooks ince the 90's the downfall of the past 6-7 years has been constant. The maps only get worse, there is less and less information, the focus is on people with less time and more money in their hands (meaning off the beaten track destinations get less coverage) and the general information chapters have been constantly shrinking. Moreover, while there used to be one writer per book now it is 3-4 together, trying to cover ground in less time but they lose in uniformity and it's a patchwork and it feels like it, plus there is a loss of writer personality in them.

There is a new Chile LP guidebook coming out in Ocober, hopefully that will be better, but the last one was pretty bad.

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