Lonely Planet Bolivia (Country Guide)

 (18 customer reviews)

I come to Bolivia twice a year and over the past three years I have reviewed more than a dozen guides on Bolivia and this is the best guide available.

Lonely Planet guides are known for their no-nonsense, off-the-beaten-path advise. The descriptions of the towns and cities are top rate. Each area has its history and climate explained. This is one of the few guides that will give you the population and altitude of major cities and towns. Kudos!

The "must see" places are listed and explained. Trekking routes are explained and mapped! There are excellent descriptions of the seven geographical areas of Bolivia (Southern Altiplano, Central Highlands, Eastern Lowlands, Amazon Basin, etc.). The section on health is "top drawer" and needs to be read before traveling here. Sidebars, or text boxes, are found throughout the book and provide you with wonderful sources of miscellaneous information, i.e., "Bolivar - El Liberatador," "Traditional Andean Musical...Read more

Lonely Planet is generally a great source for guidebooks, but I'm not convinced the authors returned to Bolivia to do research for this updated edition. It seems as if they just slapped on a new cover and republished the previous edition.

The restaurant recommendations (if the restaurant recommended is even still open for business, that is) lean heavily on pizza and pasta places that cater to travelers, which is fine if you have traveled all the way to Bolivia to eat pizza with a bunch of German tourists in zip-off hiking pants, but not useful at all if you want an authentic experience.

I also had a Rough Guide to Bolivia during my 5-week trip around Bolivia and found that book to be a far superior resource to LP Bolivia. The Rough Guide never disappointed in terms of hotel, restaurant, and sight seeing recommendations.

Lonely Planet guides are known for their no-nonsense, off-the-beaten-path advise, and their reliable hotel and restaurant recommendations. However, this guide does not come up to the quality level of the dozen or more Lonely Planet guides that I have reviewed.

There are various editing errors found in the guide. For example on page 27 the guide states: "Bolivia is thinly populated with just 1 million people". Wrong. Bolivia has nearly 9 million people.

Though this guide was published in 2004, most of the research was done in 2002. That means the information on accommodations and eateries is four years old and may not be reliable. For example, in Sucre, a delightful historic city, I went to nine of the twelve restaurants that Lonely Planet recommended. I found three of the restaurants permanently closed. In the other six restaurants, three had mediocre to bad food, and in the other three, the food was fair to good, but none of the restaurants had food...Read more