Guidebook New Zealand

What is your opinion about New Zealand guidebooks: Lonely planet, Rough Guides, Footprint or Moon (new edition in October 2007)???

We want to go for 2 months, by car/campervan and love nature, tracks, adrenaline etc...

you don't need a guidebook, just know where you are staying the first night and then start talking to people. The i-sites are great for information but your best source of info is other travellers. talk people, talk.

I contend that you do need a guidebook. For a mere $30 or so (a fraction of the cost of your trip) it will provide valuable information that far outweighs its cost. You don't have to adhere slavishly to its recommendations and you will get a lot of first hand information from other travellers but an up to date guidebook is a valuable travel tool.

As to which one ...... horses for courses ... Have a close look at them all and decide which best suits your needs for the trip you plan. I've used them all but probably have more LP on my shelf than the others.

I find that guidebooks are very useful for some things but not others. I use a guidebook for getting an overview of a country and finding out more about places I might wish to visit, and how to get between them.

Other travellers are particularly useful when it comes to places to stay. You can find out much more up to date information about good digs from people travelling at the same time as you than from a guidebook which takes well over a year to go from the research stage to the publication stage. I tend to take everything travellers tell me about places to visit with a pinch of salt though because a} most travellers, especially backpackers, go to the same five places in each country and b} a fair few of them are pretty facile. That's where the guidebook comes in handy because you can check out what a place is really like with it (That's how I avoided Surfer's Paradise in Australia when every Brit I met raved on about it). By far the best source of information about places to visit would have to be locals - I live in Bristol and most visitors to my end of the world will inevitably go to Bath and nowhere else, when there's loads of far more pleasant places in south-west England which I'm eager to recommend to people. The Thorntree is a useful resource in that respect as well.

There remains one important aspect where guidebooks, traveller knowledge and local knowledge can all be useful: places to eat! I find that judicious use of the nose is the best bet for that though.

DD

A guide book gives very good preliminary information to enable you to put some structure into your planning, alert you to difficulties or considerations and gives an great overview on where to look next for information.

Without a guide book its possible to miss a superb place - because its so well known no one ever talks to you about it assuming you will know. (case in point - a couple I came across in Turkey who did not know about Ephesus as they had taken off on a trip on the spur of the moment and were aimlessly wandering around "getting the flavour of the place" - yet they were 10 minutes walk from one of the treasures of Turkey).

Book lovers would be horrified, however over the years I have frequently cannabalised a guide book by removing the pages that I hope I will not need and rebinding the much smaller volume into a handy booklet to take with me and turning it into my very personal guide book by adding notes and advice from either fellow visitors or locals (accommodation - good eateries - out of the way and not well known local places of interest. The sort that are very interesting if you have days in an area but could be skipped if times limited).

Take heed of the usual guide book disclaimer re food and accommodation - the places change etc etc. Too true. Local knowledge is usually far superior and dare I say it - some advice in books is actually a covert form of advertising and in the worst case scenario the place has been closed for ages.

Which one - borrow them from the library first - see which style suits you best and then buy the latest version. Personally LP and Rough Guides suit me for abridged history and general info.