Product Description

Discover Greece

Get distracted by Acropolis views watching a startlit film at one of Athens' open-air cinemas
Melt into a hot tub and chat to the locals amid the thickly forested Rhodopi Mountains
Rope up and scale the monastery-topped sandstone pinnacles of Meteora
Discover your very own secret cove on Samos' little-visited eastern coast

In This Guide:

Six expert authors, over 3000 hours of on-the-ground research, 169 maps, 147 gyros devoured
New full-color sections cover the country's top experiences, off-the-beaten-track delights, and architectural highlights

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41507 in Books
• Brand: Lonely Planet
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 788 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781741046564
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
From Antarctica to Zimbabwe, if you're going there, chances are Lonely Planet has been there first. With a pithy and matter-of-fact writing style, these guides are guaranteed to calm the nerves of first-time world travelers, while still listing off-the-beaten-path finds sure to thrill even the most jaded globetrotters. Lonely Planet has been perfecting its guidebooks for nearly 30 years and as a result, has the experience and know-how similar to an older sibling's "been there" advice. The original backpacker's bible, the LP series has recently widened its reach. While still giving insights for the low-budget traveler, the books now list a wide range of accommodations and itineraries for those with less time than money.

Lonely Planet's Greece is an expert guide to this incredible country, covering everything from the narrowest walkable gorge in the world to classic Greek myths. The authors provide information on inter-island ferries accompanied by a ferry map; extensive writings on history, culture, and mythology; place names in Greek script; and advice on choosing a quiet or gregarious island vacation. A special color feature covers Greek art. --Kathryn True

Review
"For sheer global reach and dogged research, attention must be paid to Lonely Planet..." -- Los Angeles Times, February 2003

For sheer global reach and dogged research, attention must be paid to Lonely Planet…' --Los Angeles Times, February 2, 2003

From the Publisher
Who We Are
At Lonely Planet, we see our job as inspiring and enabling travelers to connect with the world for their own benefit and for the benefit of the world at large.

What We Do
* We offer travelers the world's richest travel advice, informed by the collective wisdom of over 350 Lonely Planet authors living in 37 countries and fluent in 70 languages.
* We are relentless in finding the special, the unique and the different for travellers wherever they are.
*We update our guidebooks by visiting thousands of places in person to get the details right and tell it as it is.
* We always offer the trusted filter for those who are curious, open minded and independent.
* We challenge our growing community of travelers; leading debate and discussion about travel and the world.
* We tell it like it is without fear or favor in service of the travelers; not clouded by any other motive.

What We Believe
We believe that travel leads to a deeper cultural understanding and compassion and therefore a better world.

Customer Reviews

3 Weeks in Greece with Lonely Planet
Greece was my first time travelling alone and this book was recommended by my friend from Greece. I brought other books but I never needed them. This book is laid out in an easy to read style and one can find information very quickly. When I was in Greece, everybody who did not have a Lonely Planet book was asking to borrow mine. Another nice thing about the book is the size, it seems as if the authors designed it to be carried around. It is not heavy, even at 700+ pages. I carried it everywhere. The accomodation recomendations were accurate and excellent choices. The locations of some of them could not have been better.

Lonely Liar
The Lonely Planet came with me for a 6-week stay in the Corinthia. Overall I found prices to be very outdated. When I turned to the book looking for specific information, most of the time I discovered it was either scant or missing.

In Athens, I stayed in a couple of budget accomodations in Plaka that received glowing reviews from the guide -- both places didn't even come close to the authors' high praise. In Delphi, the phone number provided for the hotel where I wanted to stay actually rang at a completely unrelated pension several blocks away. A description of which bus to take into Athens from Bus Terminal A and B would have been incredibly useful, and saved me an afternoon of wandering.

I also referred to this book many times for information about the towns and sites around Ancient Corinth, only to find it totally useless. Clearly the authors' own distate about places accounts for this gap. For example: "Loutraki: The town was devastated by the 1981 earthquake, and subsequent reconstruction has resulted in its reincarnation as a tacky resort with dozens of modern, characterless hotels along the seafront. Loutraki hardly warrants an overnight stay." That's it.

Color-photo sections are a nice selling feature of the book, but don't help much when you're trying to find your way around Greece. When I referred to this book I often ended up more lost than found. Browsing through some of the comparable guides, such as the Rough Guide or Let's Go, I unfortunately found them to have very similar shortcomings. Lonely Planet forced me to approach more Greeks and ask directions, and to learn how to find my way around on my own -- perhaps something I can thank them for after all. Next time I go to Greece, I'll leave the guidebook at home.

Just OK.
This review compares the Lonely Plantet Greece (4th Edition) with the Rough Guide Greece (8th edition). We spent 2.5 weeks in July, 2001 in Greece, our first visit, and these were our guide books.

A relucant 4 stars to each, and a slight preference for RG. We certainly found the books serviceable, and they gave us good ideas of where in Greece we wanted to go. But they were much less valuable in their listings for individual destinations. They were the least valuable compared to the other LP and RG travel books we've used (Portugal, Italy, Thailand, Tokyo).

As usual, they both overstate their hotel rankings which to me make sense only if you've been sleeping out on the beach from necessity, and now have finally scraped some money together for a room. An exagerration, but I've lost patience with gushing praise for facilities which are usually no better than serviceable and sometimes less than that. And, we're not into spending money on fancy accommodations. Occassionaly the books are on the money, but often not.

On the smaller islands RG usually had more accommodation listings, but occassionally LP did. There were at least two instances when LP had none, just saying that rooms were available.

The ferry schedules in the books, pretty much consistent between them, bore little relation to reality, even though we were there in the high season.

I want to complete with my usual gripe about these and other guide books: we don't know which restaurants and hotels were actually visited by the writers (and by which one) and when. To paraphrase from my review of RG Portugal:

LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized by the reviewers with the date. This would allow us to learn each reviewer's tastes and standards, not to mention seeing which places they actually visited.

One LP writer (not I think an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!"

Talk to the owners for your evaluation! Says it all.