Sri Lanka 12 (LONELY PLANET) Paperback – July 1, 2012

This Lonely Planet guide assumes you know little or nothing about Sri Lanka so they provide some basic history and background that's so essential for getting the most while visiting a new country. And, all the basics of currency, climate, visa info etc is presented clearly in the "need to know" pages up front.

I appreciate that there is a guide out there for Sri Lanka. It did help. However, the Lonely Planet guys really go out of their way to praise hotels, shops, restaurants, etc. that are really dumps. The descriptions of the historic sites are decent, although their history of the hilltop palace at Sigiriya is totally at odds with everything everyone told me while in country. I wish Eyewitness had done a guide on Sri Lanka. Until they do, you may be stuck with the Lonely Planet guide.

as always Lonely Planet gives an accurate description of the country in question. I find their information most valuable when choosing suitable areas for my family to visit.

Lonely Planet has become virtually useless. They've actually become worse - quality has observably degraded with the introduction of each new addition and this is no exception. It's frustrating.Seems that the spirit of the company has been abandoned - so be it. But for the price, please include a couple of maps. I shoved this guide to the bottom of my luggage and relied on locals + wifi for info.What a rip-off - LP isn't even trying.

My husband and I, we backpacked for 3 weeks throughout Sri Lanka. I only downloaded this guid on my iPad for the journey. And it was pretty frustrating! Links in the book do not work, so it makes very difficult to navigate, you have to learn what and where you are reading so if you need to go back to this page you know how to find it - otherwise you have to go through the whole book page by page.Another thing, the book has too much information but not enough! Like they tried to satisfy everybody and included everything on every subject, but they did this too general and without enough depth. So is no help anyway.The staring of the hotels are not based on the international standards! But on Sri Lankan standards and believe me they dirty nation!!!!!! We stayed in 10 hotels during our journey in Sri Lanka, in the hotels of 2 stars to 5 star Boutique hotels and each time it was scary in some other ways. The prices in the book also are completely out of the truth... Sri Lankan in most places don't have a price list, they give you price based on your "rich" look, and if you are white this mean you are rich regardless of your pocket. So if you budgeting your holiday through this book, just double it - unless you are pure Sri Lankan. They tell you in this book that there is always 10 % tip on each bill, but they do not tell you that Sri Lankan expect another tip on the top of this tip! And in the end of the trip you are skinned because everybody and everywhere is ripping you off and you feel sorry for them because your are the "rich" one and they are the poor. The one think I learn about most of the Sri Lankan people that they are perfect scammers and everything has a price! Even smallest human priceless help has a price.Anyway, this guid is better then nothing, and there was nothing else better then this guid at the time I was shopping (I bought this guid in September 2012) so although I wasn't happy with it I still used it.Good luck!

This is the first time a buy a Lonely Planet Kindle Edition. It is very useful, and so much lighter !The navigation in the chapters is quite easy, because of links going to a place to another. The only thing not so good about it were the maps, which are much more useful on the same Lonely Planet but paper edition. Altogether, it was a good buy... We recommend it !

Written well and has many places in the book that the locals also recommend! Sri Lanka is a beautiful place and the people are even more amazing!!!

Buy the book, not the Kindle version.A travel guide is typically not read cover to cover, but browsed by the reader for relevant and specific information that they need. That is almost impossible to do with a Kindle. There is no way to quickly access specific pages or even find the information one needs. So while the information is good (hence 2 stars)the inability to easily access it makes the Kindle version almost useless.