Sri Lanka (Bradt Travel Guide) Paperback – March 15, 2014

Worst travel guide ever. Not worth the paper it is printed on. Do not waste your money.There are no great guides for Sri Lanka, but Lonely Planet is better. Or use the internet.

A bizarre misfire from the generally rock-solid Bradt guides. Everything feels off – from the ambling hotel descriptions long on historical details and personal anecdotes but short on options to the rather militant focus on the tourist trail. Have you bought the Bradt because it steered you on remote mining camp visits in Guyana or hitchhiking adventures in Kurdistan? Well get ready for a book with letters from 80-year-olds bragging about how they took a tuk-tuk on a guided tour in the middle of the country. There’s a genteel, almost neo-colonialist attitude that creeps through the book, which lacks the sharp wit and editorial eye of the series best (Ethiopia and Madagascar for my money). According to this guidebook, here are some things best avoided: buses, self-directed car hire, most hotels below $150 a night and the entire North of the country except maybe Jaffna.While there might be an audience for this sort of guide, it’s certainly not the normal Bradt audience.

I bought this book as the 2015 Lonely PlanetSri Lanka guide was not available at the time, and thought the 2014 Bradt Guide would be more up to date. As admitted by Royston in the introduction, this is a rehash of an earlier book of him on travel by rail in Sri Lanka. The only saving grace is that the historical sites and the railway tracks have not moved since he last visited them. But the rest is useless. Even if Royston was lazy, he would have been able to pad the content by doing a search on a site like booking.com and use the Tripadvisor reviews to add comments. But he did not even manage that.An example of how poor this is: he spends almost a page on a hotel in Kandy, and the last sentence states that this place is probably best avoided. Maps are poor (without street names), information incomplete (like business hours) and generally lacking substance.The editing is also poor - email addresses are incomplete, Shame on Bradt for publishing something like this.