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| Vietnam (Country Guide) | 
 enlarge | Author: Nick Ray
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Category: Book
List Price: $23.99
Buy New: $13.83
You Save: $10.16 (42%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (17 reviews)
Sales Rank: 28618
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 9
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 540
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 1741043069
Dewey Decimal Number: 915.970444
EAN: 9781741043068
ASIN: 1741043069
Publication Date: August 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Discover Vietnam
Lie back on your very own junk and enjoy the languid beauty of Halong Bay's limestone outcrops.
Get lost in Hanoi's Old Quarter; sup on streetside pho and toast your fellow diners with a bia hoi.
Squeeze into the Cu Chi Tunnels and marvel at the engineering ingenuity that kept the VC hidden from enemy fire.
Join the locals in an afternoon pick-me-up of snake's heart and a cup of serpent blood.
In This Guide
Three authors, 133 days of in-country research and 105 maps - more than any other guide.
Content updated daily - visit lonelyplanet.com for up-to-the-minute reviews, updates and traveler suggestions.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Trustworthy, comprehensive with excellent maps. March 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am reviewing the L.P.2007 guide. Note: most of the other reviews are for older editions, ie. Pre-2007. I was in Vietnam January-February 2007 and used this guide.
The guide has maps that are superb and easy to use. Both the accommodations and restaurants I chose from the guide's recommendations were good to very good. The cost for accommodations are listed in dollars, instead of the insipid icons that other guides use. Kudos!!! The restaurants cost quotes are in Dong. Caveat! Because the dollar is in a free fall against world currencies, you will need to add at least 20% to the quoted price for hotels, maybe more.
Vietnam is a country of paradoxes: Communistic-Free Market. Traditional-Progressive. Etc. To capture a caricature of Vietnam is as demanding as it would be enigmatic. Yet, Dragicevich, Ray & St. Louis (authors) have written an outstanding brief profile of this country. "The Culture" is a section not to miss. No other guide is as complete if you are going to go "off the tourist track." I found towns and places in L.P. that other guides don't even list. The information was accurate and trustworthy.
Unlike Rough Guide's Vietnam (8 pages) this guide has only a smattering of book/film recommendations. Sadly, in this guide, unlike other L.P. guides, there are few sidebars or text boxes that give you interesting tidbits about the country and its people. Though most all accommodations have an email address, there are NO webpages. NOT GOOD. This guide needs serious improvement in this area.
The 2007 is a significantly revised guide and one of the best guides in print for Vietnam. This is a highly recommended guide - happy tramping. 4.5 Stars.
 Most up-to-date November 6, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was a very good guide. I got the Rough Guide, National Geographic and Let's Go and was most satisfied with Lonely Planet. This had the most up-to-date info and mentioned a few things that were not in the other guides. Let's Go might be best for people in their early 20's. All of the guides avoid giving opinions and pretty much list all the tourist destinations. I found the web site [...] to be the best source for recommends on what to see and do and used the guides for hotel information.
Lonely Planet Vietnam 9 -- LP's best try yet August 1, 2007
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
For the first-time visitor to Vietnam, Lonely Planet's Vietnam 9 overall is a fine production -- and is easily Lonely Planet's best swing at Vietnam -- even if the style police are trying to ruin the show.
Vietnam 9 covers all the big-ticket destinations comprehensively, with detailed sleeping, eating, drinking and sights information. There's a detailed orientation section, loads of maps, crystal clear photos and lots of general information. Good coverage on most of the border crossings is included and the transportation information is pretty easy to digest -- if a little confusing at times. A series of suggested itineraries, while not overly imaginative, remain useful for first time travellers.
Authors Nick Ray, Peter Dragicevich and Regis St Louis have done the hard yards and crammed much of what Vietnam has to offer into Lonely Planet's famously tight word-limits. They've done a great job putting together what is a probably the most comprehensive text available and something much improved on Vietnam 8.
Listings
Guesthouse and hotel listings are concise and all budgets are well covered. There were some omissions which struck me as odd -- Mai House on Phu Quoc, Tay Ho Hotel in Can Tho, Jungle Beach north of Nha Trang, Hoa Hong in Da Nang and the Tung Trang in Hanoi -- all outstanding places, yet none made the cut. That said, there are stacks of excellent places they do mention -- more than enough for most readers. For the rest you'll just need to read www.travelfish.org.
Sights-wise, the information is excellent. Lots of historical background and interesting snippets are woven into the text, acting as leads for the reader to learn more. For example Ong Pagoda in Tra Vinh includes a reference to the Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms for more information on the pagoda's god Quan Cong.
Transport
Transportation comes in two parts -- a summary and the destination specific sections throughout.
The summary section is good though a little unbalanced. There are almost three pages about getting a flight to Vietnam (surely something fairly simple), yet almost no information about the niche topic of buying a motorbike -- certainly an area where advice and suggestions would be useful. The train section has the briefest of fare charts, but thankfully steers people to the Man in Seat Sixty-One website (www.seat61.com) which is a far better resource.
The destination specific sections vary. In particular better information regarding frequency of bus services would have been good. There are also some discrepancies -- the Qui Nhon to Pakse bus service is listed as taking 12 hours and costing 250,000 VND, yet in Pleiku it reads "There is also an international service linking Pleiku and Attapeu (US$10, 12 hours)". This error (Qui Nhon to Pakse is at least twice the distance of Pleiku to Attapeu) is repeated in the transport introduction. Perhaps if one of the writers had actually done the trip they'd know that Attapeu to Kon Tum takes about five hours and another two hours to Pleiku, while the Qui Nhon to Pakse trip can take up to 20 hours. Of course these errors can happen to anyone -- I'm sure there are some in Travelfish -- but hey, LP has a bigger editing team than us.
Text and design
Talking about editing, the text is dense and the writing dry, verging on encyclopaedic. I've met a number of the LP writers over the years and without fail they've been a much more interesting, amusing and verbose lot than this text would have you believe. Perhaps the editors could spin the dial back a little on their "textual-de-emotionaliser device" to let the occasional witty or cheeky line slip through.
And while I'm on the topic of the back-end -- there's a new layout, and this one isn't great. A step forward is the removal of "Author's choice" aka the Lonely Planet Touch of Death -- replaced by a small "our pick" icon. A step backwards is the ordering of accommodation by price rather than quality. In this nod to the serial penny-pinchers, the rest of us are left scratching our head thinking "So which one do they recommend?".
Fact boxes though are the real blight. Vietnam 9 saw its length increased from 524 to 540 pages, yet rather than bulking out destinations, there are now more than 100 shaded fact boxes. Of course, some are useful; "Tracking the American War", tying together various sections covering war interests, is great. But half a page dedicated to Regis St Louis's motorbike breaking down is excessive -- especially when there's but a lone paragraph dedicated to trekking out of Kon Tum. Minor point perhaps, but the designers should have their cookie-jar benefits suspended for the incorrectly typeset, mistakenly padded fact box on page 163 -- sloppy.
Call me old school, but a move back to the basics -- accurate and easy to use information -- would be welcome. As an example, if you're looking for a list of internet resources for Vietnam, you'll be needing to refer to pages 21, 42, 58, 63, 69, 74, 79, 84, 89-90, 171, 465, 476, 494 and 495-6 -- whose bright idea was that?!
Now I'm getting petty and trivial -- lets move on.
Maps
The 105 maps cover all the major destinations and look terrific, but in anything short of ideal conditions, are difficult to read. Vietnam 8's maps, while uglier, were far easier to use. The new maps replace clunky shades and chunky outlines with gentle hues and delicate lines. This may look great in Lonely Planet's mapping HQ, but when you're crammed in a minibus trying to decipher the Hanoi map by torch, you'll be thinking different.
Photos
The photos are terrific. From the wraparound train cover-photo to the bored tourists gawking at the carpet in Reunification Palace, they do a great job of catching -- and explaining -- Vietnam. In another layout change, the photos are clustered in the first few pages, closely followed by a food overview and then eight more pages of colour in the centre.
Conclusion
It's worth noting that some of my criticisms are general and not specific to Vietnam 9 -- overall it's an excellent guide and I've rated the book at 8.5 stars (out of 10). If you're going to Vietnam and planning on hitting all the key destinations -- you'll be set with this title -- no questions asked.
*A pet peeve -- I purchased Vietnam 9 at a bookstore in Jakarta on July 20, and had seen it at the airport weeks earlier. Yet on the half-cover it reads "9th edition published August 2007". Unless Lonely Planet have a special in-house definition for the work "published" this is misleading to potential buyers who are looking for what they consider to be the most "up-to-date" text available -- it should read July 2007.
 Totally useless for the independent traveler... July 21, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I was already very disappointed by Nick Ray's "Cambodia", but "Vietnam" tops it all...
Useless information: For example: "Post office - get rid of your stamps here." Do I really need a lecture what a post office is used for? What about opening times? Or if that changes too often - just don't say anything at all. But don't tell me what a post office is good for!
For the package tourist the book might be okay. But for the independent traveler it is a horror! Example: "To get to the Perfume Pagoda by public transport is too complicated. Take a tour!" What?!?! I thought it's a Lonely Planet guidebook and not one of these colorful DK travel guides...
Oh well, the only reason to use LP Vietnam is b/c it's the only guidebook you can get in SE Asia. It is a good idea to buy a Rough Guide (I hope that one is better!) in Bangkok/Hong Kong/Overseas and carry it all the way to Vietnam.
On the other hand: Vietnam is probably not a good place for independent travelers anymore anyway (well, of course "off the beaten path" still exists... Thanks for that! But it's hard to find in Vietnam...)
Do the page 376 hike. Just be prepared April 20, 2007
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
We hiked to the top of Nui Ba Den (or Black Lady Mountain). LP page 376 says it's a 6 hour trek to the top and back, but we took longer.
We didn't ride the cable cars part way up; we walked up from the very bottom.
Started 8:40 am, got back down about 6:30 PM, and we rode those lovely cable cars down the last part. If I ever do it again, I'm riding those cable cars up to the trail head.
Have you hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon? I have. 5,000 vertical feet down, 5,000 vertical feet back up.
Black Lady Mountain is 3,000 vertical feet up, 3,000 back down. And I can tell you it's a much tougher trail than the Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon trails (both of them) are hands-free trails. That is, unless you want to occupy a hand with a walking stick, your hands are free to juggle hacky sacks, etc.
The Black Lady Mountain trail requires some hour-long boulder scrambles, and in some parts you had really better keep three on the rock and only move just one hand or foot at a time. Keep three on the rock. Really.
If you're no climber (I'm not) your upper body will be about half as sore as your legs the next day, because you are going to use both hands a lot. The next 2 or 3 days, getting up and down stairs was actually tough to do, real sore, so factor a recovery slow-down into your travel plans. I was way, way more wiped out than by hiking the Grand Canyon.
Don't try the trail to the top in flip-flops; we saw several sad dead flip-flops. Some nice Teva sandals were great.
Be careful, a bad fall is possible, a twisted ankle could happen even easier.
Take plenty of water. We screwed up on that, and were very hot and thirsty when we got down to the cable car station. Victory drinks never tasted so cool and sweet!
Take plenty of water. It's not hard to do, many vendors at the top of the cable car run.
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