Insight Guides - China
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Insight Guides - China (with the Discovery Channel)
(ISBN: 978-981-4137-78-2)
Instead of Lonely Planet, we got this travel guide for China as we wanted “great pictures, which vividly convey a sense of everyday life”. Heck, we are going to live in this country, best to see hat everyday life is like, right?
A partnership with the Discovery Channel, this guide promises to be:
everything you’ll ever need in a guidebook. It is an inspiring background read, an invaluable on-the-spot companion and a superb souvenir of your visit.
The photographs are definitely a good reason to get this book. Browsing through the 350 page book had me wanting to visit picturesque and intriguing places like Gugong (the Forbidden City), the Great Wall, Xinjiang, Wuxi, Hangzhou, Guizhou, Fuzhou, Kunming, Tibet and Qinghai. Sanxia (The Three Gorges) and Sichuan were at the top of my list too until the recent tragedy…
Another good thing about this guide is the introductory section, which outlines the history, beliefs, culture and cuisine of China. I learned a lot of things about the mainland Chinese reading just this section!
I also got a better idea of how Chungguo (the Middle Kingdom) is organized through the sections on northern, southern, central and western China. This is very helpful for someone whose geography isn’t the best subject and also that certain Chinese cities can be mistaken for one another i.e. Zhejiang, Chang Jiang, Henan, Hainana, Jiangxi, Shanxi, Jiangsu etc.
The guide also has a different way of keeping practical information on travel, transport, hotels, restaurants etc separate from the background reading. This is really great as you can immediately flip to the section that you’re looking for, unlike it being embedded with all other info in Lonely Planet.
However, I found the sections on upcoming cities (e.g. Xiamen) lacking in info, with most concentrated on ‘popular’ cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming etc. All other guidebooks already focus on these hot spots, why not be go off the beaten path?
Also, I would have liked the hotels section to be more comprehension, especially as I was hoping that this “everything you’ll need in a guidebook” would be of some help for our impending holiday.
In the end, I fell back on this good old link for some insight (pun intended)!
For a guidebook that you’d naturally want to tote with you, this hefty volume is quite a load. For a guidebook that’s meant to travel with the traveller, I have a feeling that pack-as little-as you-can folks will leave this book at home in favour of lightweight Lonely Planet.
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