DK Eyewitness Top 10 Sydney: 2015

These Top 10 guides by DK Eyewitness are great when one is spending only a few days in one of the world's great cities, in this case, Sydney. (Previously, we used the Top 10 Guide for Athens and found it to be very helpful there as well). This Top 10 provides great detail on the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the fascinating back story and floor plans for the Opera House, and inviting descriptions of The Rocks, Darling Harbor, Toranga Zoo, Bondi and Manly Beaches, and tells you how to get around using the ferries, buses, and walking. It has a pullout map in the back and several maps showing graduated detail, so it was very helpful to stay oriented. Like all of DK's Eyewitness Guides, you get history, great graphics and photographs, and suggestions for how to get the most out of one or two days of exploring etc. We used this book to plan our trip (we knew we wanted to sign up for the "bridgeclimb" in advance and this book provided the details that we needed). However, we ran up against what, for us, was a huge disappointment with this specific guide. One of the Top 10 categories for Sydney is restaurants. We have always relied on the descriptions and price range (from $ to $$$$$) in the Eyewitness Guides to decide where we will dine. In this case we picked Aria, which is one of the best in Sydney, and had a price designation of $$$. WELL, this was completely off base, and when we sat down with the menus in front of us and saw that appetizers where $40 AUS and main courses were $60 AUS...we were stunned! We had chosen the restaurant based upon the description and price info in this guide and brought two other couples with us. The food was good and the service was excellent, as described, but the price point was completely inaccurate and greatly exceeded our budget. We stayed, and did our best to limit the damage to our wallets, but it was beyond disappointing and embarrassing, as my husband and I had selected this place. In general, we are great fans of DK Eyewitness Guides because they not only provide great descriptions of places of interest, but they are also very good at restaurant and hotel description and recommendations. They generally provide an accurate price range, and apt descriptions of the food and ambiance. (In this case, we were disappointed and inconvenienced, as we discussed above, with the inaccurate designation of a restaurant's elevated price range, hence the removal of one star) We have been using these guides for over 15 years, when we travel abroad, and have found that we can usually rely on the information contained within them. We find the history of each place, the timelines of events, the color graphics, maps and photographs to be user-friendly, very helpful and engaging.