The Right Guide Maps, Current Info Crucial To Good Budget Travel Book

When you travel independently and on a tight budget, your guidebook is often your only ally.

You rely on it to find places to eat, sleep and change money; you turn to it to untangle your destination’s culture and politics.

Finding the right guidebook, however, has itself become a tangled task. Venturing into a bookstore’s travel section is like venturing into an open-air market in Guatemala.

There are too many colors, too many options and too many places to look at once. Travelers can find themselves overwhelmed even before they leave home.

But armed with some knowledge of guidebook publishers, you can save the sensory overload for your travels.

First, understand that as a budget traveler you won’t get advice from concierges, tour guides or taxi drivers - you won’t be dealing with them. You need all the information that can fit between two covers, so disregard glossy guides crammed with more photos than facts.

Pictures may heighten your anticipation, but they won’t do you much good when you’ve arrived at a train station at midnight and need to find a bed.

Jeff Brauer, one of the authors of “On Your Own in El Salvador,” suggests you consider three criteria when picking a budget guidebook.

“One: It should have a lot of maps,” he says. “Two: It should have a lot of current political and historical information. Three: It should be written by somebody who speaks the country’s language and who has lived there.”

Without its maps, Lonely Planet might not have become the uber-publisher of budget and independent travel guides.

In each Lonely Planet guide, there’s another map every few pages, of a neighborhood, a village, an archaeological site or a wilderness area. The maps are informative and accurate, as is the text.

Besides its definitive guides on Southeast Asia and Africa, Lonely Planet publishes a guide for nearly every region of the globe, including Antarctica, Mongolia and the United States.

Some travelers complain that Lonely Planet guides are too dryly written. This complaint could never be leveled against Let’s Go guidebooks and The Berkeley Guides.

The 30 guides in the Let’s Go series are researched, written and updated yearly by Harvard and Radcliffe students. University of California at Berkeley students produce the 13 volumes of the Berkeley Guides (the best of which are California 1996 and Eastern Europe). Both series are written with a sharp eye for the offbeat and the affordable, and both series exude collegiate irreverence.

Other books, such as Rough Guides, are not as widely recognized as Lonely Planet’s guides, but there are advantages to using lesser-known books. For one thing, they often provide better information for more obscure areas. “On Your Own in El Salvador,” the first book produced by On Your Own publications (to be followed next fall by guides on Honduras, Guatemala and Romania), provides in-depth practical and political information for a country spottily covered by Lonely Planet.

If you’re a history addict or culture-vulture, you might turn to Blue Guides, which rarely bother with practical information. Instead, Blue Guides provide unparalleled historic, archaeological and culture guidance.

In a remote and untouristed country such as Albania, where there aren’t any tourist facilities anyway, the meticulously researched Blue Guide to Albania is all one needs.