China - Part 2: Book Deal

After flipping through most of the China travel books at the local B&N (Union Square), I end up deciding to order these two from Amazon.com (it was cheaper):


Lonely Planet China - I'm too used to the format. They're pretty much all set up the same way. It's easy to find stuff for me. They also got the 2 days / 3 days itinerary for each city which helps a lot. Also, this book has some random cities we might be in: FuZhou (Simon), GuangZhou (Kingman) and ShenZhen (Me).


Beijing and Shanghai (Eyewitness Travel Guides) - I found this one very useful. It tells me what and why I'll be looking at touristy things instead of just standing there looking at it. It also has pretty pictures and maps.

Shameful Shit: Lonely Planet Writer Admits To Fabricating Guide Book

"Shameful shit fellas...Shameful Shit." - Clay Davis, The Wire

Lonely Planet Writer Admits To Fabricating Guide Book Based On Info From Girlfriend

From Consumerist.com: "Who needs to actually travel in order to write guide books? Not Thomas Kohnstamm.

From Reuters:

The Sunday Telegraph said Kohnstamm also claims in his new book "Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?" that he accepted free travel, contravening company policy.

He said in one case he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

"They didn't pay me enough to go to Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern at the Colombian consulate," the newspaper quoted Kohnstamm as saying."

(via consumerist.com)

- Always a good idea to get info from more than 1 source.

Egypt - Part 1: Orders

Part 1: Orders

The plane tickets are booked!
Egypt Air happens to be the only airline that flies to Cairo nonstop. I think Delta will have a route later this year. The flight is going to be 12 hours. April 19 - April 26. I'll arrive at Cairo at 11:30AM on Sunday 4/26. Gim booked the tickets by calling the airline direct. Apparently their website was buggy (according to the sales guy on the phone). He called because I didn't have my passport number with me; it was required by the website. He had to fax his credit card, signature and id to them after ordering - no passport numbers needed.

The travel books are here!
After an afternoon of test driving travel books, we decided on "Lonely Planet Egypt". I have a bunch of books from Lonely Planet and find them pretty useful. Naturally, I ordered from amazon.com, since it was cheaper. What sucks is that the new edition is coming out in May 2008. So I'm stuck with the 2-3 year old edition.

I also picked up the "Lonely Planet Egyptian Arabic Phasebook".
Arabic doesn't sound like European languages which I'm semi familiar with from taking Spanish for 6 years (I'm horrible at it). I also read somewhere on the interweb that they didn't speak a lot of English there. Better be safe than sorry. I don't want to be caught pointing and motioning when the diarrhea hits.



Now starts the planning...