Originally Posted by
lhrsfo
Herein lies the difficulty with recommendations. I look for something you don’t and obviously vice versa. I don’t see any point in traipsing around some monument with 100,000 other people when the site is already familiar through film and photos and the facts surrounding it, if I am interested, I will already have read about. I am looking for the vibe of the city: what would I do if I were a local and how would I live? The last thing I want to do is stay in a chain hotel and “do” sites. That’s why I avoid travel books written by non-locals (DK’s apparently are written in Delhi mostly by people who have never left India) and buy those with content that has not simply been culled from websites.
The LP writers during the 80s and 90s were almost certainly non-native (remember it was mostly an English language publication), and only spent 2 or 3 days in minor cities, but I appreciated the consistency of both the format and their research style (e.g. short list of hotels and restaurants, how to get there, and summary reviews of major tourist attractions). I found their content to be far more valuable than the TA we have today (i.e. establishments write reviews themselves).