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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
An magnificent travel companion
By A
The Lonely Planet formulates splendid travel guides, and their Tanzania/Zanzibar edition is no exception. I have applied this book on four dissimilar trips, and found it indispensible. The guide does an admirable occupation describing the standard tourist stops (the game parks, Zanzibar's Stone Town, etc.), but it is real strength lies in giving the details necessary to take the roads less travelled.
I have found the hotel prices in the guide to be outstandingly accurate, altho naturally a lot of things have changed. The "getting there and away" divisions provide choices for transportation to and from cities and towns; while the range of number of things from which only one can be chosen in general stays the same, departure times and prices may modify drastically. Always plan on things taking longer than you expect.
Tanzania and Zanzibar are awful places to visit, and the Lonely Planet will give you the means to make the most of your trip.
26 of 28 persons found the following review helpful.
zanzibar
By A
We are a couple of divers and we decisive to go to Zanzibar for diving holidays. We took the book with us and the only thing we may say is - it's a bible for budget travelers. There are a lot of magnificent recommendations in regards to the overnights and good restaurants. The prices in the book were reasonably accurate. Important thing was that it gave us a good get started in bargening. The only thing this book was missing out was galore more data on island pemba.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
The book is full of errors
By Torstein
This is one of the worst editions of Lonely Planet books I've ever read.
The book is full of factual errors which in all likelihood is a result of poor research. I doubt that the researcher in truth have been at a lot of of the places, and that he has copied info from the Internet instead.
I traveled this summer in Tanzania, and ran into faults in this guidebook time and again. The Rough Guide was far more accurate, even though that book is two years older.
I may receive that phone numbers are wrong, given the perpetually elaboration and changes in the Tanzanian mobile phone system, but addresses will have to be right most of the time.
Further more, I may receive that travel times can't be relied upon as precise in Africa, but if the journalist had actually travelled the distanses himself, he would have noticed things like:
Travel times for bus companies are given to the region, not inevitably the city it self. That may mean a lot of divergence given that the regions are huge.
The slow ferry to Zanzibar does not take 3 hours as stated in the guide - notwithstanding if you ask at the ticket office they will tell you that. The slow ferrys are all old freight boats with an extra deck, and they take amidst 6 till 8 hours on the entire journey.
Several restaurants in this edition do not exist, or haven't opened yet. Given the lack of selective information on the feed and service I doubt that the journalist genuinely bothered to sit down to eat at the places noted in the book.
Shopping districts brought up in the Dar es Salaam chapter does not incorporate the type of shops mentioned. For instance, there are nearly no curio or souvenir shops along the Samora avenue, even even though the book claims there's a whole lot of them.
The exploration behind this book is just so bad that it can't be relied upon. Get the Rough Guide rather - it's much better!
Torstein
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