Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan (Lonely Planet Travel Guides)

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Lonely Planet Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan (Lonely Planet Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) (Paperback) I have always been a great admirer and user of Lonely Planet guidebooks, but this time they really produced a rather poor work. On one side I can't blame them, as the region is hard to get to know, and this probably remains the best guidebook about it anyway. On the other hand, lots of data are simply wrong, for which I can see no reasonable excuse. For example, the guidebook says that there are daily flights betwen Tbilisi and Yerevan, while there have been no scheduled flights since the collapse of the USSR in 1989 ! And contrary to what is written, KLM, Northwest or Alitalia have never flown to Yerevan. The guidebook says that there are buses from Armenia to Turkey, and on the very same page it also says that it is impossible to get from Armenia to Turkey except via Georgia... Overall, there is very little this guidebook can tell you on how to get around within the region. The guidebook gives plenty of information on hotels in Tbilisi which are supposedly good, while they are now filled by refugees (surely an interesting and touching thing to see, but not where you might wish to stay). The major internet café they recommend in Tbilisi does not exist. Many addresses are simply wrong (either old or non-existent). The book makes a lot of fuss about the corruption and unclear regulations of Armenian and other border officials, which is not the case (for example in Armenia you CAN get a visa at any border for 25 $ which is valid for 3 days, and when you leave you pay 3 $ for each day you oversayed your visa) - no corruption, no problems. The book gives lots of concerns about safety and other issues which are unnecessary, and especially in its Armenia section it seems to be biasedly 'anti-local' (something one would never expect from a guidebook). Overall, it seems poorly researched and not always well written. The chapter on Nagorno-Karabakh is ridiculously short (4 pages), not to mention the one on Abkhazia (less than two pages !). Nevertheless, some information is indeed useful and sometimes even correct, and you are better off taking this guide with you to the region, rather than being without it. Just take its advice with a lot of caution, and don't take any of its data for granted.