Moon Yucatan Peninsula

I greatly enjoyed reading information about the Yucatan Peninsula from someone who had lived there rather than just visited. It brings a broader perspective. Also, the author writes objectively, focusing on the information to be shared without asserting her own personality. I highly recommend it.

In preparation for a week-long trip to the Yucatan, I looked through several guidebooks: Frommers fell short, Lonely Planet failed to impress, the Rough Guide was quite good, but Moon was consistently the best. First, it is a very good value: Moon has about 100 pages more than the Rough Guide, and almost 200 more than Lonely Planet and Frommers, all for about the same price. Yet, the book feels no bulkier than its competitors. Moon takes advantage of this extra space and fills it with good descriptions of the various locations, good maps, and good recommendations of places to eat and sleep. I appreciated the fact that Moon gave recommendations for a wide range of budgets, as many other guides tend to be overly skewed toward one category of traveler to the neglect of others. Partially by design and partially by coincidence, we ended up eating at many of Moon's recommended restaurants and staying at many of the recommended hotels, and had very good experiences at all of them. My only minor complaint is that I wished they'd marked the direction of one-way streets for cities like Merida like the Rough Guide did. For anyone planning a trip to the Yucatan, the Moon guide is an indispensable traveling companion. Definitely the best of the guides I used for planning before hand and referencing once in the Yucatan.

I really depended on this book to familiarize myself and get me around Chiapas, and it did a great job. Some reviews of restaurants and hotels were a bit out of date, but, of course, that is normal with a guide book. I found the layout easier to use than Lonely Planet, but they were both good and complimented each other. My only complaint was the scale of the maps was inaccurate for walking in San Cristobal and distances were a lot farther than I thought when starting out.

Recommended by the Smithsonian tour groups, I found this a very helpful "tour guide" for visiting a new part of Mexico.

I found this book much more accessible, helpful, and accurate than the rough guides version. A great balance of historical info, recommendations for sites, hotels, and restaurants, and commentary. I've always been an avid Let's Go fan, but sometimes they get too cheap and hostel-oriented for me. Moon's books (I bought several after this one) seem to represent the cheap/free and off-the-beaten-path attractions equally with choices that are a little more mainstream and comfortable. My only complaint is one that I always seem to have: I would have liked more maps.