T A B L E_T A L K The joys of barbecue! Discuss your best memories from around the grill in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Salon Exclusive: Everest debate, Round Two By Weston DeWalt The co-author of "The Climb" counters Jon Krakauer's claims and questions the role of media in high-risk, extreme sports (08/14/98) Salon Exclusive By Jon Krakauer Everest controversy continues: Jon Krakauer rebuts Weston DeWalt's response (08/07/98) Salon Exclusive By Weston DeWalt Everest controversy continues: Weston DeWalt responds to Jon Krakauer (08/07/98) O Over Africa By Maryalicia Post An open-cockpit ride in a reproduction 1935 plane (08/06/98) Insider's guide to Paris By David Downie Paris insider: The hottest places to eat, stay and play (08/05/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		T H E -T R U T H -about guidebooks That 1998 guide you just bought has all the latest information, right? Wrong. - - - - - - - - - - BY DAWN MacKEEN | Seven days after graduating from college, I boarded a plane and landed in the middle of Greece, with little knowledge of the language, the culture or the geography. I had two months from that moment to become an expert on the country for the now-defunct Berkeley Guides; to travel to, research and write about 15 islands and nine cities and towns, stretching from the northeastern island of Lesvos clear across the country to the southwestern island of Zakinthos. In 60 days, and in each location -- and one of the islands I had to cover was Crete, with five of its own destinations -- I had to find the best hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, museums, archaeological sites, beaches and bars, as well as the prices and schedules of the ferries, trains and buses. Plus I had to write them all up -- and find some time to eat and sleep. Armed with a backpack stuffed with every guidebook on the region and old newspaper clippings, a few changes of clothes, an AT&T card to call my editors back in Berkeley and the biggest bottle of ibuprofen a person could buy, I was ready to cover half of Greece, to trek the mountainous dirt roads and seek out the red sand beaches, to get sick on boat decks while en route to places inaccessible by car, to fall off walls in order to peek at crumbling ruins. I was ready to go "off the beaten path" and to "travel on a shoestring" -- to be that poor student traveler all the marketing materials had talked about when announcing the debut of the Berkeley Guides series, which would now include a guide to Europe for the first time. I had lived near a Greek family growing up, had studied rhetoric in college and had inhaled the works of the ancient Grecian orators, and with that I sold myself as someone experienced to do the job. It was up to me (remember, I was "experienced") to fill up my empty notebook with everything a traveler might need when coming to the regions I was covering -- the Ionian, Dodecanese and Cycladic islands, Crete and the Peloponnesus -- and then some. What I did was akin to party-hopping, touching down on each island just long enough to get a sense of it, and then moving on to the next, with all of them quickly merging into one blue Aegean blur. With a $35 daily stipend, I couldn't exactly hire an army to aid me in scouting out the streets, pensions and ruins, so I dipped into my own pockets to take the twice-as-fast hydrofoils instead of the slow-moving ferries, rented motorbikes instead of relying on the undependable, time-consuming bus system, went on dates with locals to ferret out recommendations from them and arrived alone in the dead of night in strange places (without a room to sleep in) so I could keep up with my editor's schedule. I even went back to work within an hour of crashing on a motor scooter -- despite the fact that I could barely walk. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. There was no way to research everything readers and publishers could want. So I started to just glance at the places I was supposed to be reviewing. Is this hotel OK? Glance -- yeah, looks that way. Is this a good restaurant? Glance -- yes, looks like one. But I struggled with never being able to give readers the "best" information possible; I was simply doing the best I could under the circumstances. Unfortunately, the circumstances I worked under -- the tight deadlines, the superficial method of information gathering, the financial restrictions -- are almost a guidebook industry standard (or I should say, sub-standard). And yet guidebooks are thought of, and promoted as, the definitive key to a place -- comprehensive in scope and discriminating in judgement. The glossy covers almost scream at you with their inflated claims: "Everything you need for a perfect trip"; "The perfect companion for independent travelers," saturated with "expert advice" and "travel bargains." Guidebooks have become almost biblical in their authority, filled with words to travel by, passed down from someone who knows to someone who doesn't -- required reading before any trip. But there's a huge disparity between what readers think they're getting for $19.99 and what they actually get. I've known people who have read their guidebook so many times they can recite it almost word for word -- which places to visit, how to get there, what to see (and, by sheer exclusion, what not to see). They have traveled from one end of town to another just because of a restaurant recommendation. Yet they could probably have gotten just as good advice by asking a local where there's good calamari -- which is most likely what the guidebook writer did, without ever taking a single bite. "If readers assume I've tested every hotel in, for example, the Lonely Planet Thailand guide, they must be idiots!" says Joe Cummings, author of more than 30 guidebooks, travel atlases and phrase books. "It's physically and economically unfeasible to sleep in every hotel and guesthouse in Bangkok alone, not to mention the rest of the country. In one district of Bangkok there are over 200 guesthouses -- I'd never get around to writing a guidebook if I had to sleep in every hotel." N E X T+P A G E | The 10-minute museum survey