Have you ever been on holiday and struggled to choose a guidebook? I mean, where does one start? I imagine in a bookshop. But, if anything, that makes the task even harder. The choice is just too wide. Waterstones sell around 12 guidebooks per major city — far more if you want a whole country (there are a staggering 23 on India, for example). So I asked around. Which guidebook, if any (young travellers are increasingly turning to the web and online travel forums for advice whilst others are too mean to buy a guidebook and rely on friends’ recommendations, a hotel map and a good concièrge), did they choose when heading off on a mini-break? Were they faithful to a particular brand or did they judge a book by its cover? ‘I take the Times World Atlas,’ said one. ‘Heavy and a bit short on words but gives a great sense of perspective.’ Not very helpful. ‘I don’t bother,’ said another, ‘but always wish I was the kind of thorough person who did.’ One suggested Lonely Planet but then said ‘they’re rubbish for city breaks’. No two people proffered the same book and I was getting nowhere.
There is certainly a generational divide when it comes to guidebooks. Younger folk seem to rely on Wallpaper City Guides (‘Never heard of them’, the literary editor said, rather proving my point). They are colourful little tomes that look wonderful on your bookshelf and single you out as cool and trendy. Trendier still are the Hedonist guides (the clue is in the title), in which there’s a section called ‘Play’ and culture comes after both ‘Snack’ and ‘Party’. The blurb says they are designed to appeal to a more urbane, stylish traveller; ‘to make you feel like a well-heeled local’ and take you to ‘seriously chic bars’ and ‘the most fashionable places in town to rub shoulders with the local glitterati’.
These things are not exactly at the top of my mother’s to-do list. People of her generation (I couldn’t possibly divulge her age) swear by the Blue Guides, which brings us to another guidebook divide. The Blue Guides set the cultural benchmark and tend to appeal to more discerning, sophisticated (posh) travellers. At the other end of the spectrum, Lonely Planet is geared towards backpackers and travellers on a budget. Somewhere in the middle are the Rough Guides, Time Out, Footprint, DK Eyewitness Travel and many, many more.
But what happens if, adhering to the stereotypes, you fall into two categories? Say trendy but a bit broke, or terribly sophisticated but with a penchant for clubbing? No one wants to lug two guidebooks around, and at roughly £13 a pop, who can afford to? In an effort to end the debate, I narrowed the choice to a shortlist of four and set off for Istanbul. Bad news off the starting blocks for mother and her ilk: there is no Blue Guide for Istanbul, only a general one for Turkey. I settled for DK Eyewitness Travel, Time Out, the Rough Guide, and, because I’m quite young and hip but not necessarily hedonistic, the Wallpaper City Guide.
I took two of my favourite places in the city — the main sightseeing draw, Hagia Sofia, and a little-known gem (an antiques emporium in an old Turkish townhouse called A la Turca) — and put each book to the test. First off, only Wallpaper listed A la Turca, demonstrating the guide’s defining quality — originality. This teeny guidebook doesn’t attempt to cover the whole city. Rather it picks out an interesting but selective bunch of hotels, sites, shops and so forth. It also goes big on pictures, wonderful for whetting the appetite, and suggests a great itinerary if you’ve only got 24 hours. It gives very little or no history and background and doesn’t go into anything in very great detail. As it is so diminutive and much the cheapest (£4.95), I suggest this is an excellent guidebook companion but certainly not thorough enough in its own right.
And so to Hagia Sofia. Whilst Wallpaper does nothing more than mention it in its 24-hour itinerary, the others are all as extensive as each other, and so have to be judged by a different criterion: usability. Time Out’s coverage is broken into two sections of long prose and while the condensed history is interesting, the section covering ‘the cathedral today’ is not conducive to reading as you wander around. Without any kind of key or map, it’s very hard to follow what is meant by ‘the eastern end of the south gallery’ or ‘the inner narthex’.
The Rough Guide, on the other hand, provides a floorplan of the building, including where the most significant figurative mosaics are. The text on each of these mosaics is then highlighted in bold, making it easy to find as you approach one. But best by far is DK Eyewitness Travel. It has a labelled, three-dimensional drawing of the cathedral, a floorplan and a historical floorplan, showing which parts of the building were built in which century (it has been razed and rebuilt three times). Though perhaps less long on history, the detail it provides is easily the most instructive and the layout allows one, even at a glance, to understand the beautiful but complex cathedral better.
After five days I was in a position to award some prizes: best street maps (Time Out); worst street maps (Wallpaper — it doesn’t have any); most extensive (Rough Guide); least up to date (Time Out — the others are all 2009 editions); best practical information (DK). But best overall? It’s a tie between Time Out and DK Eyewitness Travel. These two are informative enough without being overly so and still cover almost everything, unlike the Wallpaper Guide, which while offering eight pages on ‘Sports and Spas’ fails even to mention the Topkapi Palace. And if I had to choose one: DK Eyewitness Travel. A new discovery for me but one I’ve since returned to and haven’t been disappointed by. Their motto, ‘The guide that shows you what others only tell you’, isn’t especially catchy but it is true — take my word for it, these guides do exactly that.
Comments