NEW FOR 2004/2005 season

NEW FOR 2004/2005 season

NEW FOR 2004/2005 season

Strengths Incredibly thorough and complete.

The wildlife guide section contains beautiful B&W line drawings and much more detail, explanation, background and interesting trivia than any other guide.

The largest, clearest, most detailed, and useable maps of areas and towns.

Weaknesses
Rather bulky. The main complaint that we've heard about this book is that even though it's well organized and indexed, there is too much information.

No color photographs, although the B&W illustrations and photos are excellent and prolific, and you'll be seeing the real thing in living color anyway.

NEW FOR 2004/2005 season

Strengths
Lonely Planet's style and history. If you've used LP guides for travel elsewhere, you'll be very comfortable with the organization and style and you'll probably find this guide the easiest to use.

A wildlife guide section complete with high quality color illustrations and photographs will introduce you to some of the more common residents of the National Parks and Wildlife reserves.

Lonely Planet maintains an excellent web site, complete with a relatively active forum/bulletin board

Weaknesses
Less sidebar information and what there is lacks flair.

The identification of locations on the rather crowded maps is ill-conceived and tedious. Who besides Lonely Planet counts "5, 7, 11, 18, 19, 10, 12..."

If you want internet information from Lonely Planet visit their excellent web site because this information is very poorly presented in the book. Internet information (web and e-mail addresses) is not included with the regional descriptions. It is in an appendix that is arranged by type of organization. So if you are trying to reserve accommodations at OTS, you need to know to look in the appendix for "Other Businesses" rather than "Places to Stay."

While the eye catching color wildlife guide is a nice bonus, it's poorly supported. The book contains little background or general information on Costa Rican Natural history.

Strengths
The notes in the margins are clear, concise, and incredibly useful. In many cases they match the notes we've penciled into the margins of the other guidebooks.

The best map of Costa Rica in any guidebook, and the hiking, locale, and city maps are high quality too.