Lonely Planet Baja California & Los Cabos (Regional Guide)

 (8 customer reviews)

Lonely Planet's Baja book is an excellent guide to the peninsula. I especially appreciated the detailed info on how to get around in Baja. The section on health in the front of the book came in handy after a small altercation with a manta ray! It was excellent for travelers on a budget. The descriptions of cities, places to stay and restaurants were all very accurate, but left enough room for our personal tastes to guide us to the spots that seemed especially fitting.I felt as though once we arrived at our final destination there was a lot more there than was really covered in the book, but I guess they only have so many pages to work with! This was the only book we brought with us, and it made for a great trip!

My wife and me chose this LP guide for our recent trip to Baja Norte. I actually enjoyed Palmerlee's writing style and his side commentaries on the Baja music scene and other topics of interest. However, there were just too many cases of inaccurate information. For example, Palmerlee says a taxi from Ensenada to La Bufadora is about $12 when actually the round trip cost given to us by numerous taxi drivers was $40. He then says (correctly) that you can save money by taking a $1 bus to the town of Maneadora. But from there, he says, you must hitchhike to La Bufadora. The truth is, as we discovered by talking to the locals, you can easily catch another $1 bus from Maneadero to La Bufadora. Thus avoiding the hitchhiking which many people, including my wife, would not want to try.

Another problem was that the hotel recommendations were too often off the the mark. For example, at the highly recommended Hotel Los Pelicanos in Rosarito we were taken to a dark, dreary room by a...Read more

... and with about as much personality and selectivity. Like the Moon guide, a very useful book to have once you find yourself in Town X but not very useful for figuring out whether it would be better to plan a trip to Town X versus Town Y.