This guide provided fairly reliable, basic information when I was trekking through Southeast Asia for seven months. When I landed by bus, taxi, motorcycle, truck, boat, trishaw, foot, or (sometimes) horse in a strange town at night where I didn't speak the language, it kept me alive. With its help I could always find the town center, the police station, and a bus stop.

Just don't expect it to enhance your experience, or even guide you safely. It's written in a rather smug, perfunctory style, and despite its budget approach seems aimed at very conventional travelers. There are none of the colorful, devil-may-care suggestions one finds in other guides, and it brings to mind the dour, conscientious tourists one meets on the road who are very nice but could backpack through Borneo without bringing back a single interesting story. This book has no spirit.

Maybe the reason it seems a bit inflexible and "un-hip" is because the editors are not responsive to the feedback of readers. I was very badly robbed a couple of times while using services recommended highly by this guide (for instance by the owners of the "Good Luck" Guest House in Bangkok), and after writing Lonely Planet with a polite request that they caution future travelers, I received no acknowledgment of my letters, and in fact the services in question are still touted by their guide.

This sort of apathy illustrates to me why their latest editions often seem years out of date, and why hotels and restaurants highly praised by them turn out to have closed down years ago. I understand that they have a limited number of researchers, but if they ignore input from readers who actively explore these regions, their book is naturally going to be out-of-touch, behind the times, and useless.

My advice is to buy the book if nothing else is available, because it does provide detailed factual information like phone numbers, addresses, etc. Just don't assume that it tells you all the interesting places and activities in a given city, because that's a laugh!! And don't ever take its advice on quality or safety.

A very useful and reliable, concise guide on South East Asia. Very good information on different highlights in each of the countries, good info on getting there and travelling around. Good to know where and when to go, as every other Lonely Planet guide featuring multiple countries.

I don't know why they still sell it here, but this is an old edition now, and when it comes to guide books - obsolete. Go for the 8th edition which is the newest (as for this date), and which I have extensively reviewed.

A lot of the content of this book seemed familiar to me - as if I had read it before somewhere in another (superior) guide.

Generally I am a fan of the Lonely Planet series and I have bought a guide for every destination I have visited in the past few years. This book really disapointed me, mainly because it is so out of date by now. It is PAST time for a new edition (and the update available on lonelyplanet.com is scant at best). Of course with some guidebook companies refusing to write a Myanmar guide because of the political situation, what alternative do travellers really have? Nearly everyone we met on our November 2001 trip was carrying this guide, and everyone complained about it. So what to do? Go to the Internet! Although I cannot list the URLs here, I found several recent travelogues on Myanmar that were extremely helpful.

We often followed the LP's restaurant tips and found the food at these establishments barely edible. Remember LP's disclaimer "prices go up, good places go bad..."? Well, apparently many of these places have gone bad in the past 3 years since this edition was written. So, I will send my comments to LP and await the next edition. Until then, take what you read in this book with a grain of salt, and do your Internet research before you go. Happy travels.

Joe Cummings' 'Lonely Planet Laos' is the most pedantic and useless guidebook I've ever been unfortunate enough to use. Cummings seems desperate to show the reader how much he knows about the country, going off on endless tangents that lead nowhere and tell the reader nothing (especially in his 'Dangers and Annoyances' section). Does your average traveller really need to know how the licence plate system in Laos works? His information on hotels, restaurants and other attractions is shockingly out of date and inaccurate. I once used the 1997 edition, and I noticed that very little in the book has changed. Don't waste your money.

After using the Thailand Lonely Planet guide (also written by Joe Cummings) extensively this summer (it was extremely helpful), I found the Laos guide really disappointing.

Laos is changing at an alarming rate and a lot of the information in this guide was out of date. Also, unlike the Thailand guide which is quite detailed, I found this book to be kind of skimpy. The maps aren't very good, a lot of towns weren't included, transportation details were no longer correct or not included, and because of the surge in tourism and high inflation rate, the prices listed were meaningless.

Until edition 4 of the Laos Lonely Planet guide is published, I would recommend buying The Rough Guide Laos which was published in January 2000 and was getting good reviews from other tourists.

I have recently completed a 12-month backpacking journey around the world, a trip that included Laos. In each of the 20-some countries I visited, the Lonely Planet I carried proved invaluable. However, after having read some of the other Amazon reviews of the LP Laos book before using it, I was expecting this particular guide-book to be worthless. But in fact, after using Cummings' book for nearly a month in Laos, I was pleasantly surprised to find it as useful as any other LP that I have used. Actually, expecting this guide-book to be useless, I brought along another Laos guide-book, which proved to be much less useful on the road when used side-by-side with the LP.
Not only did I find the accomodation and eating sections for popular locations as accurate and update as I would expect, but Cummings' did a fine job of briefly describing many off-the-beaten-track places, providing initial ideas for numerous adventures into the unknown.
And of course, as in any country to see the "real-thing", it is always rewarding to venture to places that you have not read about in a guide book. For this reason, I would certainly not criticize Cummings for not writing more.
All in all, in my opinion this book certainly meets the lofty standards set by Lonely Planet.
A bit of advice to would-be travelers: During my 12 months of diligently using Lonely Planet guides, I have been amazed by the travel-blunders made by fellow travelers who have carried travel guides, but have not used them. Some travelers perfer to do it "on their own", but I have seen numerous costly, time-consuming, and uncomfortable mistakes made that could have been easily avoided if they would have simply consulted the book in their hands. A little diligence goes a long ways.

Utterly useless! I found myself in mexico with this waste of space. Luckily after only two weeks I found the Lonely Planet book.

Buy it if you need something to keep a door open, or rest you foot on, but that's all.

Some important towns are not listed, hotel and restaurant listings are brief and often prices are not included. Do yourself a favour and buy the Excellent Lonely planet guide to mexico.

It is tough to say if this book is the Good Mexico Guidebook or the Bad one on the market today. I don't want to jump to the hyperboles of my fellow reviewer. I have used Lonely Planet books and had an awful time of it before (see my review of Lonely Planet Brazil). So many people use Lonely Planet books that these "off the beaten path" travellers end up forming their own beaten path: they all stay in the LP-recomended hotel, eat at the LP-recomended restaurant, etc. LP is the Microsoft of independent travel books, and so you should use their books with caution. On the other hand, like most LP Asia books, LP Thailand is a classic - it served me well in the 1980's. So when I saw that Joe Cummings had traded his Thai travelling boots for a pair of Mexican ones, I jumped at the chance to use his guidebook for my Mexican travels. The results are mixed. Mexico is so big, there are so many places to go, and there are so many things to do, that it is a daunting task fitting it all into a single book (even a book this big!). Like LP's "On a Shoestring" guides, this Mexico book appears to actually be a synthesis and summary of some of Moon's other, more in-depth books, such as Pacific Mexico, Cabo, Cancun, etc. For that reason, it would appear that some of the Moon regional guides contain the details and nitty gritty. So if you aren't planning on criss-crossing the country from north to south, east to west, you might consider investing in one of the regional guides which covers a smaller area of Mexico in more detail. As an aside, if you can read a bit of Spanish and want to get really nitty gritty in the "Places to Go / Things to Do" category, check out mexicodesconocido.com.mx. They don't publish any guidebooks, but their travel magazines and on-line content is rich enough to replace any of the Mexico guidebooks on the market.