While on the road in Egypt, I’ve been making use of “The Rough Guide to Egypt.” Traditional travel guidebooks have been out of fashion for quite some time, but I still use them when I can. I suppose “Rough Guide” is the best of the bunch these days, especially since Lonely Planet revamped their popular line of books into something more closely resembling a series of coffee table books on countries of the world.
Rough Guide is good, but I terribly miss the old “directory” format of the old Lonely Planets from their golden age in the late 90s and early 2000s. They included detailed route-planning and public transit information, while current guides mostly assume that travelers (even budget ones) will hire a private car to get between cities. I also love how each city listing in those books began with essentials: postal services, money services, communications services, tourist information offices, etc. They sometimes mentioned a particular restaurant owner who could arrange cheap taxis, or a hotel that was most convenient for late night bus arrivals. I know that sort of stuff is less urgent now… but it was comforting for the long-term budget traveler. I still recall the heft of the guide I used in China around 2006 and how its tissue-paper thin pages included detailed information about even the least-visited cities in that country.
The book I’m using now has really (really, really) detailed descriptions of the many tombs and temples found in Egypt, but is somewhat vague in terms of how to get around. Coverage of minor cities is minimal.
It dawns on me now that travel guides might be good sources of short “reading in daily life” passages like those that appear on the new TOEFL. I’ll be leaving my current guide behind when I move on to the next country, but I’ll hunt around my bookshelf for some materials to paste into future columns.
