Richard Sterling

This is a classic Eyewitness guide to Vietnam. Nice maps, great cutaway and perspective drawings of some sites and a reasonable overall coverage. We have just completed a 13 day packaged tour of Vietnam and the guide was certainly helpful for us. The main take-away for me from this was that 13 days is nowhere near long enough to do the country justice. I'd like to go back and spend a lot more time in places like Ho Chi Minh city. (The locals still keep calling it Saigon). I liked the traveller's hints and the potted history and found the diagram of the Temple of Literature (which we visited), to be helpful. Overall, a compact and helpful guidebook with some nice maps and pictures.… (more)

I used this to plan my recent trip to San Francisco. Apparently, there is a newer edition out, which I didn't realize, but this is the one my local B&N had shelved.

I felt like I learned a lot that I need to know before heading out to the city. The hotel I picked based on the books recommendation was very noisy though. I wish that had been mentioned somewhere. Some admission fees had increased (a lot in some cases), some hours had changed, and the one restaurant that we went to based on the dining recs had closed. This might all be fixed in the newest edition, but I did read this wishing that Rick Steves did American tour guides. It got us where we were going and we had a good time. What more can you really ask for?… (more)