The Rough Guide to Crete

A lot of useful and reliable /proved by practice/ information for Crete travellers! Example: When asked for some info from hotel reception they started to wave hands, making big eyes and calling mobile phones / really eager to assist-many thanks / - but after reading relevant item with Rough Guide later on - here it is - all clear Together with Rough Guide Map Crete makes us a must while visiting Crete !

Well after completing my tour book for Crete, I feel that I am much more prepared for my upcoming three week visit to the island. I really enjoyed the parts that dealt with the history of the island.

Crete is huge -- you can't even picture how huge until you see it from the air. Crete is 160 miles from end to end, and that is why it is very useful to buy a separate book to help you find your way. I chose this book because it was the first tour guide that I found that explored Crete by bus, instead of insisting that a foreign traveller go through the troublesome ordeal of renting a car. This book is very good in that area -- it offers detailed bus and ferry schedules and acceptable maps for every city. This guide offers tremendous hotel reviews, covering most of the obvious budget hotels and showing you how to get to them. It also provides extensive historical information on some of the more interesting sites, such as Knossos and Moni Arkadi. There are some important details, however, that this book overlooks. I feel like perhaps the writers didn't take notes on the names of things as they were travelling; in Iraklion, the book gave general descriptions of tavernas they recommended, instead of just saying their name. This made it kind of hard to figure out what they were talking about. As with some other tour guides, the maps skimped on street names, which made them very difficult to use; they also never give the Greek letters for places, making it sometimes hard to translate what you read in the book to what you see on signs. I was also disappointed in this and other tour guides, in that they didn't mention some very critical basic information, such as how to deal with tipping, or local etiquette; Greeks have very specific expectations regarding their hospitality. I would also have liked to have read that I was not allowed to flush toilet paper down the drain -- not every facility has a warning sign about this, and it would have been useful to read about it rather than discover this oddity through experience.

It's unbelievable how much detailed information is in this book. The organization of the book is very convenient and there are page references throughout the book to the topics being discussed. This makes it extremely easy to either read the book from front to back or to pick out a narrow topic and read about it. My only complaints are that I wish it had more color photos and a better map, but the information is more important than photos anyway. This book will definitely make planning your trip to Crete a lot easier. And it's much, much better than the Lonely Planet Crete guide. Lonely Planet publishes some great books, but its Crete guide is not one of them.

The largest Greek island is well described in this entertaining book, which is very thorough in its coverage of all the major and minor sites. An essential aid for any visitor, it is marred only by some out of date information which should have been checked before this latest edition was published