The Rough Guide to China

The Rough Guide to China by Rough Guides
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It’s hard to keep a travel guide up to date but this book does its best. It’s great as a guide to independent travellers, but it doesn’t consider the fact that sometimes people just like to wander and often it’s hard to decipher which area each destination is focusing on. It’s hard to cram such a vast area into one volume but there are methods that the publishers can use to reduce the volume or at least allow more space for better content. Rather than print entire addresses; a postcode and map reference might suffice as many people have access to online maps nowadays. Also, some use of symbols in the listings or a simple referral to earlier page numbers may reduce the need to list the same venue in another section. Finally, given the vast size of the country; it’s kind of insulting that the same image is used to illustrate both the front and back cover. As is stood, there was no way I could cart this thing around with me every day and so it stayed in the hotel room as I tried to commit the relevant pages to memory each morning.

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