Lonely Planet Hong Kong & Macau

I returned from HK/Macau less than a week ago where my traveling companion had this book. It is full of useful and accurate information on Hong Kong. We found a number of restaurants listed in this book and were pleasantly surprised, however, the Macau sections were next to worthless. I'm convinced that there doesn't exist **anywhere** an accurate map of Macau.

We planned to follow the walking tour of Macau AND tried to, but were unable to follow the instructions - we are both engineers (MIT and former Rocket Scientist) so following directions isn't usually a problem for us.

Bottom line - good for HK, not so much for Macau.

I had Fodor's Hong Kong's 25 Best, 5th Edition (25 Best) and found it less useful for our 13 day trip. It would be fine for 2-3 days however. The Fodor's included a pull out map that was much better than LP provided.

If you're looking for a book with good background information and history lessons this is the one for you. It is not the book to take to walk around the city with. It is simply too heavy. Your best bet is to just cut out the walking maps to take with you before leaving your hotel room. I liked the little walking tour of the bird market, flower market and fish market in Kowloon. As far as the restaurant recommendations are concerned...don't bother looking at the book. Most of the listings are somewhat expensive by local standard and don't offer the best food. All you have to do to find a good meal is to walk around and go to one that's packed with locals. Restaurants are everywhere and most of them open until the wee hours of the morning. There's no fear of not getting good food in Hong Kong. Go ahead, try something you can't find at home.

This book gives ou a nice overview of the region, and incredible specific tips for visiting HK and Macau.

I found this book to be extremely helpful in covering all the bases of transport, taxes, tipping, typical business hours, history, background, and a good overview of what's where, and how to get there. Often times, we'd have questions about things like poverty level, health coverage, average income, quality of water -- and found that the guide pretty much answered all of those, and more.

The maps aren't super, and because of the size of the book, it made it difficult to carry. Besides, if you're asking a local for directions, you'd want a bilingual map, as the English names of cities/stations drive them crazy. (ie, Mandarin romanizations in a Cantonese city) I do give it credit for accurately pointing out the numerous obscure markets in Tsim Sha Tsui, as well as the various shops in Hong Kong City. The walking guides were surprisingly useful.

The reason why I give it 4 stars is because HK is all about food and shopping, and the book came up seriously short on the food portion. (no pun intended) Despite it being only 3 months since publication (12th edition, Jan 2006) literally *every* restaurant this book recommended (of which we attempted to find) turned out to be non-existent, had changed ownership and had turned into some other shop. I attribute some of this to bad luck, but I seriously doubt the restaurants didn't *all* go out of business in the last 3 months, but rather that the information on the guide was a little outdated.

The section on food is one part I really relied upon to book to help me out, and was pretty disappointed when it didn't come through for me, as the alternatives to an English guidebook aren't great. The alternatives are to ask the hotel clerk (who will recommend the hotel restaurant), or a random stranger (who will recommend his friend/family's restaurant), or read a weekly magazine about which eateries are good (which require Chinese reading skills).

Despite my frugal 4 stars, this guide is considerably better than most, and is worth the small change to purchase, especially when compared to the amount of money you spent to book your vacation.

This was the first time I bought a travel book from Lonely Planet. I loved it because it provides a historical as well as a modern background on the cities being visited. The recommendations for dinner, site-seeting, etc were great! The only thing I would've added is a rating of the top sites to see if you are only in the city for a short time.