bandung hotels, tourism and travel

Friday, 11 March 2011 22:21

With a Lonely Planet guidebook you'll get the best out of your Indonesian trip. The 9th edition of Indonesia will take you to the best beaches and bars in Bali, through lush paddy fields in Sumatra, diving with turtles off the Gilis in Lombok and to a traditional dance in Ubud.

Lonely Planet guides are written by experts who get to the heart of every destination they visit. This fully updated edition is packed with accurate, practical and honest advice, designed to give you the information you need to make the most of your trip.

In This Guide:

• Discover natural Indonesia with our special color chapter
• Detailed Itineraries for planning the perfect trip
• Green Index helps you step lightly on your travels

It definitely covers enough attractions to keep people occupied for months, and is more than enough for those with an average interest in the country.

As usual with this series, it covers practical details like prices, public transport and city maps.

There is also more than enough background information about culture and history for most readers, although unfortunately some useful things that were still present in the previous edition, like an overview of national parks and the longer lists of recommended books about various aspects and regions of the country have now been removed. Many less frequented islands, towns and areas that were still described in several previous editions have now been omitted, too.

So those with a deeper interest in Indonesia, or with an interest in a particular region, might prefer more detailed, regional guides to those areas - there are several covering Bali & Lombok to choose from, Lonely Planet has great (if ageing) guides to Java and Nusa Tenggara, while Periplus has eight separate ones to all parts of the country, though the Periplus ones are best backed up with this book for practical details.

In this edition, prices seem to have been updated more carefully for this edition.

The best thing about it is that the the chapters on the long-ignored regions of Kalimantan and Papua have finally been much improved, though it is quite obvious that much of the new info was collected online (eg on LP's very own Thorn Tree travel forum) or from tour-operators, rather than on the ground. Still, coverage of those 2 regions is now much better than it had ever been before!

The Maluku chapter once again contains separate entries on the more remote Aru, Tanimbar and Sula Islands and is probably the best part of the whole book now.

The Sumatra chapter has finally added some long-popular destinations that had before been mysteriously missing from the book, such as Tangkahan and Kedah in the north, though it continues to ignore very popular Pulau Belitung down south.

If you are planning your first trip to Indonesia, get this book by all means.  Though for Kalimantan and Papua the separate chapters from the new edition are worth having - and can be downoaded separately from the publisher's website.