Lonely Planet’s Eastern Europe
A Guidebook Review to Planning your Holiday from Albania to Ukraine
Traveling through Eastern Europe is easier with a guidebook. It takes up valuable space, so be sure to choose well. Is Lonely Planet's Eastern Europe guide right for you?
Eastern Europe has only recently started to become a mainstream tourist destination, after the collapse of communism just over fifteen years ago. This means that an informative guidebook is even more useful than normal, when tourist information offices and websites are often sparse. Top-selling publisher Lonely Planet's 2005 eighth edition of its country guide to Eastern Europe covers the entire region.
Features of Lonely Planet's Eastern Europe
Running to almost a thousand pages, this guidebook won't fit in your pocket, but if you are planning fairly extensive travel around the Eastern Europe region, it provides information arranged by country, in alphabetical order from Albania to Ukraine. Each country's chapter starts with a contents page, map and quick facts about population, language and visas. Suggested itineraries and summaries about climate, history, religion, arts and food precede sections divided up geographically, beginning with the capital city.
The geographical sections give maps and facts on sightseeing, accommodation and transport. Lonely Planet tends to tell it like it is: if a museum is only going to bore everyone, they usually tell you. Accommodation suggestions are arranged from hostel style through to "top end" hotels. Each country chapter ends with a directory of more detailed information on country-wide transport, money and postal services.
At the back of the book, more general regional information is collected, for example about travel health, transport between countries and banking and currency issues. A useful language guide then provides a couple of pages of key phrases and a pronunciation guide for all of the main languages of Eastern Europe.
Is Lonely Planet's Guide For You?
For a multi-country journey around Eastern Europe, I find this Lonely Planet guide ideal. Although coverage is, of course, not as extensive as a guidebook dedicated to just one country, for trips in each country lasting up to two weeks or less, there is more than enough information included. The sections on history, arts and politics also provide interesting reading material during a trip, almost eliminating the need to pack any other books.
If your trip is concentrated on only one or two countries, a specific country guidebook would provide you with better in-depth information. Equally, if you are doing a whirlwind capital city tour hitting only key cities like Prague and Budapest, the tourist information available from official offices might also suffice.
More information:
The online Lonely Planet shop has information on its Eastern Europe guidebook.
Can't decide where to go in Eastern Europe? Read our Top Tips article.
For information on flying around Europe, check Flying on a Budget.
