Lonely Planet Rajasthan, Delhi & Agra

Lonely Planet lives up to its reputation as the best budget travel guide out there. Great!

If you're doing the 'typical' first time trip to India - the Golden Triangle - this is all you need - no reason to have a full guide to India since the south is completely different from the north - carrying a full guide to India if you're just going to Delhi, The Taj Mahal, and say Jaipur, is like carrying a guide to to Poland for a trip to France - I guess that's why Lonely Planet decided to publish this concise guide. Traveling to India takes a lot of preparation and you discover you forgot to do half the preparation you needed when you get there - this book helps full the gaps, prepare you for the shocks, gives great connection information to the often confusing and chaotic, but surprisingly pretty well ran Indian railways. It also gives you good thumbnail estimates about prices -which is essential for Western travelers as you are continuously the target of price gouging. Highly recommended.

This is a concise but pretty good guide of Delhi, and I used it a lot during a long stay in this city, which in my opinion is much more interesting than many tourists think. The maps at the end are very useful. However, if you have to spend a good deal of time in Delhi, what you should really get is Delhi's "Eicher City Guide", which is just splendid. It's like a higher quality "eyewitness" guide of Delhi. Hundreds of excellent picture, a lot of historical information, and amazingly detailed city maps at the end. Eicher's maps cover the whole city (which is huge) and not just the tousist spots, so they can be immensely useful if you have to stay in Delhi for a long period. Eicher is unfortunately pretty old, and difficult to find in the US, but it's worth looking for it. It should not be difficult to find it in India (where it is published) for a fairly low price. My advice is to have both Eicher and the latest Lonely Planet guides.

nother reliable guide by the folks at Lonely Planet.The Delhi guide provides a good introduction to Delhi with a good review of history and culture.It covers all the key highlights in the Delhi area and the places to stay and eat have good recommendations. However the restaurant, shopping and entertainment listings are a bit out of date now. It is impossible to keep listings accurate in a place as chaotic as India, where many of the best places to eat are roadside stalls. The excursions section focuses mostly on Agra and Jaipur. For someone who wants to travel around using Delhi as a base, the LP North India guidebook may be more useful as it has most of the Delhi information but includes more comprehensive material on Rajasthan and the Indian Himalayan areas. The maps are good but lack detail because most maps only show the main roads while often many interesting places are found in alleyways and small lanes. This guide ( like the LP series) is budgert minded which is a good thing but many of Delhi's better restaurants and entertainment are in the upscale hotels.Very useful to the independent traveler who wants to spend some time in Delhi ( on a budget)

My daughter and I referred to this book constantly during our recent travel to India. We found it to be extremely useful, full of information that we needed, without having to sift through information that we didn't need. I highly recommend this book to anyone traveling to India on a trip that includes visits to Delhi and Agra.