Product Description

Features colour highlights sections, easy-to-use grid-referenced maps and insightful history, culture, food and environment chapters by specialised contributors. These Lonely Planet Country Guides are the country guides for independent travellers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #292810 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 396 pages

Travel and Leisure
"Down to earth, accurate information for every budget, enthusiastically written."

About the Author
A Lonely Planet publication.

Customer Reviews

Good Reference Material/Starting Point
This is a good guidebook and fairly accurate. In a country like Indonesia, however, things change quickly so use this book as a reference not as a bible. Do you own research and talk to other travellers. Since the LP Bali is the default travellers' guide to this region, most of the restaurants and hotels covered are not the best values. Many get a steady stream of customers just because of a good review and never bother to maintain the facilities. The best deals require a lot of footwork and bargaining! Learning some bahasa indonesia always helps. The language section is adequate but the phrasebook is much better.

Nightlife is making a big comeback with the reopening of Paddy's Reloaded (did they really need the weapons terminology?) and the return of the young aussie crowd. Check Bounty for the college age crowd, Seminyak for the posh/club crowd.

You can also avoid the moneychangers altogether by going to the BCA ATMs. Look for the ones that give you bills in 100,000 Rp denominations. You get a more reasonable maximum with these machines.

The activities sections are good, particularly the surfing one. They do a poor job of covering Lombok however, if you are planning on heading out there for an extended stay, I would recommend the LP Indonesia. Be forewarned though, the constant soliciting outside of the Gili Islands in Lombok is extremely tiresome. For scuba, skip Gili altogether and head to Flores or Sulawesi (or even back to Bali's Menjangen). Many of the sections are blasted out and the whole place is overfished.

Finally, if you want to book a boat trip to the Komodo Islands, you have a couple options, the pricey Perama boats (better and more luxurious boats) or the cheapo independent boats (very basic converted fishing boats). The second option is very very basic - you sleep on dirty mats and the snorkeling equipment doesn't work. The food is pretty good though and you do get to all the major sites with no hassle. If you don't mind all this, you can book these boats pretty much anywhere on Lombok. The dragons are all worth it - we saw a couple fighting over a mate.

OK but not great
This book was helpful but we still had to do extensive research to figure out what we should see and what was really worth it. The maps were not user friendly and the way the book is divided (by areas) is rather complicated to navigate since there is no map showing the different areas covered by all the chapters.
To sum up: this guide is useful but not always easy to use.

Well up to standard
I am Balinese and live in Ubud.

As I am involved in tourism, I always keep a close eye on guide books to make sure that they do not give any incorrect information, either generally in respect of Bali, or in particular, in respect of my own restaurant, shops and accommodation in Ubud.

I am pleased to say that the text is remarkably accurate - as are the maps - which is not easy in the fast changing world we now live in.

The sections on Balinese culture are concise and very helpful to those visiting the island for the first time. Balinese culture is complicated and the visitor will benefit greatly from the explanations in this book.

There are also some nice photographs. Recommended.