Product Description

Whether you are planning to visit a city, a region or a country, DK's foolproof 'Eyewitness' approach makes learning about a place a pleasure in itself. All the traditional guidebook subject matter is covered-descriptions of sights, opening times, hotels, restaurants, shopping, entertainment, phrase books etc- but, with the help of specially commissioned illustrations and maps, DK makes essential information easy to access and quick to absorb. No other guides explain the history of a place as clearly in words and pictures. DK Eyewitness Travel Guides-the best guides ever created.

Continuing to expand our South American coverage, this beautifully illustrated Eyewitness guide will be the premier travel book to Peru, with complete coverage of Lima, the Amazon Basin, and, of course, Machu Picchu. Whether your interests lie in floating on Lake Titicaca, watching the condors soar at Colca Canyon or experimenting with South American cuisine, DK Eyewitness Peru will help you find the essence of the Andes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18575 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 353 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780756636456
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
It is packed with photographs, illustrations, and maps.
Provides an In-depth look at the Inca Trail and Amazon Jungle
Shows cutaways and floor plans of all the major sights
Lists a huge selection of hotels and restaurants
Lists sights, museums, markets, and festivals town-by-town
Provides street-by-street walks and thematic tours
Just opening the book entices the reader into exploring Peru in great
detail - and with such incredible photos! The book shares Ancient sites,
crafts, restaurants, maps, architecture, museums, cathedrals, rainforests,
mountains - it is TRULY a guide that shows you what others only tell you. --WanderingEducators.com

Customer Reviews

Pros and Cons
I will start my review by saying I always buy the DK guides for everywhere I go. However I never just buy one guide for any trip and this is the first time I have done so and I have come to realize how lacking they are. this is not to say I will stop buying them and I will tell you why.

Pros: The pictures. Nothing beats these guides with the pictures. Trust me. when you go to Machu Pichu and someone says did you see the tres ventanas and you go "I hope so" well you won't hope so with this guide b/c this guide will show you what the tres ventanas looks like. In peru they have these HUGE churches. And each church has like dozens of these rooms of altars. but the most famous is "el negrito" maybe you are like me and just aren't into the church thing but want to see what the big deal is but don't want to miss the big must see with this guide you will make sure you won't. and in these churches you can't take pictures. so when you get back you can show your friends what you saw. brilliant.

The restaurant recommendations were excellent if a little pricey.

Cons: the maps suck. the map of lima was pretty good but there were none for any other cities. none of cusco and that is a major city! cusco is studiedly a maze, but some sort of map would have helped.

and it is short on information. it doesn't tell you how to get anywhere. I wouldn't have known to get a train from cusco to machu pichu that I couldn't take my suitcase on the train (or that i would be charged a HUGE fee to do so) how to buy tix for the bus to get up to machu pichu (which is sort of complicated) or that some places to climb in machu pichu are limited to 400 persons per day so you should arrive early (like 430 am early). This is important since this is the most major site of peru!

it didn't tell me about other ruins to see, or other cities, or give good itineraries, or how to travel around. Just that taxis were bad. Which they actually weren't.

I never realized how limited in info and scope in actually getting around these guides were when this was the only guide I took. I was lucky that I had a limited amount of spanish and people in peru were really nice and kind of directed me around told me what to see and what not to see.

bottom line: I still say to buy these books b/c I think they help you find what you are trying to see, but I also say check out the web and print out itineraries, information on how to get somewhere, or other info that you can discard so it doesn't weigh you down later! Happy Travels!

An excellent guide to a complex country
It's tough to pick the "best" guidebook for a particular destination, and the proliferation of free travel information on the web makes choosing "the one" even tougher. My wife and I always start with a copy of an EyeWitness guide for the destination: there are pictures on every page, and we find the images help us plan our trip: the guides are particularly good for architecture and art. The practical guides in the back provide a useful overview of currency, hotels and restaurants.

This guide to Peru is a particularly good example of the DK offerings: the images, paper, text, all are up to the high standards of other guides in the series. We returned from our trip to Peru two days after the Eyewitness guide arrived in the mail, so that we used two other guides during our trip. Reading EyeWitness at home reinforced our belief that the Eyewitness series is the best starting point for us.

Peru is a very complicated country, and Eyewitness does a superb job of describing that complexity in words and in pictures. Its treatment of Lima was particularly good -- we were lost in the details of the city as they appeared in the two other books we used on the trip, but Lima came to life clearly in the Eyewitness guide. (We thought that Peru Insight Guide (Insight Guides) was a very good guide for the reasons indicated in my review of that guide.)

Of course, you'll need more specific and detailed guides to many of the attractions: the Inca Trail if you choose to hike it, or Machu Picchu if you visit. But for a comprehensive and visually appealing overview, Eyewitness can't be beat.

Having written that, there is really only one page that usually matters in deciding whether to buy a guide book: the newer the guide the better. This book appeared in a fully revised American edition in May, 2008. That makes this guide very hard to beat for two or three years in our experience.

Note: DK maintains an excellent website at TravelDK , with updates on many of its guidebooks.


Robert C. Ross 2008

BEST TRAVEL GUIDES
EYEWITNESS TRAVEL GUIDES are the best guides you could find. I've bought every one they have published to the places I have visited, and always know where I want to go and what are the most important places to visit,
with the pictures and 3D images of the buildings and maps I don't get surprises as to visit a place not worth while. You optimize your travel time. I have about twenty of their guides, just hope they increase the places they review in the near future.