Described as a Rough Guide Special, this new edition is one more recruit to the all-embracing Rough Guide empire. Under the protective banner of Penguin Books, the Rough Guides not only publish guidebooks about just about every country in the world, but also issue CDs of the kind of music you're likely to hear when you get there, offer their own insurance packages, market the bags you'll need to carry your stuff in, sell phone cards for use when you're away, and even publish a Guide to the Universe.
Rough Guides, in other words, is fast becoming one of those organizations that cater for your every need. Like the Communist Party, the Mormons or Walmart, they'll live your life for you if only you'll let them.
Rough Guides now have a Web site covering 25,000 destinations, CD guides to the music they offer you on other CDs, guides to how to play the instruments you'll hear on them, plus guidebooks to pregnancy and birth, unexplained phenomena, Elvis, hip-hop, Manchester United, personal computers, Paris cafe music, Gypsies, cult movies, children's books and videogaming. There doesn't appear to be a Rough Guide to Death yet, but it's arrival, like that of death itself, can only be a matter of time.
The danger of such massive organizations is obvious. However original and innovative they were at the start, they easily become impersonal -- routine victims of their own dazzling success. Just as Lonely Planet can be seen as a slave to its own ever-cheerful cut-price smile, so the Rough Guides could become efficiency and all-inclusive comprehensiveness taken to a laughable level.
As a guide to everything you need to know before you go, First-time Asia offers an opportunity to take the temperature of the enterprise as a whole. It arrives in the bookstores alongside newly up-dated guides to Indonesia and China, each of over 1,000 pages. Those kinds of guidebook are hard indeed to come to terms with. But this slimmer introductory volume arguably contains the series' strengths and weaknesses in something like a nutshell.
Backpacking in Asia, from which Taiwan is at present largely free, has resulted in whole areas, such as Thailand's Koh Samet and Khao Shan Road, where thousands of young travelers mass, all clutching books such as this one, and rarely stray further afield.
"Backpackers' centers do tend to take on a peculiar ghetto character of their own," the authors cogently write, "a strange medley of watered-down Asian practises and cheapskate Western ones, which not only insulates travellers from the real Bangkok/Delhi/Kathmandu, but makes Bangkok, Delhi and Kathmandu seem indistinguishable."
Backpackers' beach resorts can also see travelers hanging out for weeks or even months without ever venturing into the nearest town.
To its great credit, this book comments on, and warns its readers against just this phenomenon. It may in some way contribute to the thing it's warning against, but it warns against it nonetheless.
But it also mixes decrying lack of interest in the local culture with advice to take it easy at the beginning of your trip. "If you feel like drinking milkshakes and eating nothing but cheese sandwiches for the first few days, then why not?"
The book also has an admirable, and often wittily-expressed, sense of perspective. It writes, for instance, "If you read about rioting in Xingjiang province in China and you're heading for Shanghai, it's a good idea to stay alert, but with the distance between the two at almost 4000km, chances are you'll be out of the line of fire."
First-time Asia's organization comprises a set of country-by-country mini-guides of a few pages each, followed by (the bulk of the book) compact advice on things like health, security, when to go, insurance, sleaze, discount flights, your first night in Asia, and so on.
The section on Taiwan is five pages long, the same as for Bangladesh, Bhutan and Cambodia. With China at nine pages and Indonesia at seven, this isn't a bad allocation of space for the ROC. Its recommendations here are predictable -- Taroko Gorge, Kenting, Alishan, Tainan and the East Coast Highway, as well as Taipei (Snake Alley and the National Palace Museum). Additional highlights, if you have the time, are listed as Lukang, the Fokuang Shan monastery complex, Sun Moon Lake and Lanyu (Orchid Island). It comments on one Tainan Web site, "Find out where the local people go to pray for a mate or to change the sex of their unborn child, and to communicate with the dead."
Sometimes, of course, encapsulation such as this book specializes in will inevitably add to the concentration of travelers in a few places the authors so lament. A list, for example, of just eight highly-recommended guest-houses, each for under US$15 for two people, is unlikely to add to the more even distribution of budget-conscious foreigners.
Because Rough Guides has the resources to know in advance that they will up-date the book every couple of years, they are able to risk quoting prices in its pages. This is excellent, and just what travelers invariably want and need.
I once met two New Zealand backpackers on a bench in Chiang Mai absorbed in the Insider's Guide to Thailand that I myself had written a few years previously. I sat down beside them and, after a few introductory pleasantries, said "What's that guidebook like then" The reply came immediately: "Bloody terrible! Lots of flowery prose, but it doesn't tell you how much to pay for anything!"
This book must have been relatively easy for an organization like Rough Guides to put together. As a kind of "guide to the guides," it's essentially a spin-off from work already in the can. The company can extract the gist of their guidebooks to individual countries, add salt and pepper, and whisk them up into a marketable confection in no time. Even so, the result is a conveniently compact digest for exactly the audience it's aimed at, first-timers wanting an over-view of the possibilities, and reassuring counsel on the many problems they're likely to encounter.
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