Korean Job Discussion Forums

[tfunk]

I'm traveling around Southeast Asia and I don't want to lug around travel guides for each country. It seems to make much more sense to get e-book guides. Can anybody recommend good e-book travel guides for Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam? The Lonely Planet guides for these countries are more than the weight of my laptop (I could also just bring a USB drive with these e-books on it).

Travelfish.org looks good, anybody have any experience with these guides?

[Matman]

Those lonely planets and rough guides are a total waste of space. Usually it's obvious the writer has never even been to the place he's writing about. It's better to google and search travel forums and also pick up a free tourist guide and map from the airport. E.g. pick up the Thaiways booklet from Bangkok airport. Here's their website:

http://www.thaiwaysmagazine.com/contents.html

Here's the equivalent for Cambodia:

http://www.canbypublications.com/

Again you can pick it up at the airport and also in bars and hotels.

[EssPea]

I don't know what the above poster is talking about... they are worth their weight in gold when they give you maps, locations of cheap accommodations that taxi drivers can understand and locations of fun this to do locally. I'd buy them just for the decoding of local bus routes...

[Matman]

You might think you're getting cheap accomodation but in reality you're getting substandard overpriced accomodation. E.g. in Jakarta lonely planet recommends Jalan Jaksa as the place for budget accomodation. In reality anywhere else in the city will give you higher quality accomodation at lower prices. If somewhere is mentioned in lonely planet it quickly starts to fill with clueless travellers walking around with their nose in lonely planet asking to be ripped off so the price of everything increases.

[tfunk]

I find it unusual that nobody has yet catered for this market when you consider the amount of effort that backpackers to make sure their backpack is light.

I know I'd rather be carrying a PDA with ebook versions of all the countries I want to visit rather than the huge and, in parts, irrelevant Lonely Planet.

What do people who go to China do? Do they bring the whole Lonely Planet or just rip out the pages that are relevant to them?

[Samantha]

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/

According to the website you can buy individual chapters in PDF, so if your PDA has the ability to read PDF files you could do it that way. You can also buy full versions in PDF from the site if I understand it correctly. Did you look into that

[tfunk]

Samantha, if you're referring to the 'buy by chapter' feature on lonelyplanet.com then it's only available for certain regions...Asia isn't one of them.

It's great to see this feature, all the same. You can also get lonely planet guides for the PSP (psp passport)!

http://shop.lonelyplanet.com/Primary/Product/Pick_and_Mix_Chapters.jsp?bmUID=1188822022386

[Samantha]