Customer Reviews
A Very Poor Guide! :-( - By: W. László, 08 Jun 2006 
Once upon a time, Lonely Planet had a good guide to Papua New Guinea (371 pages), & an excellent one to the Solomon Islands (279 pages). For better or worse these fascinating countries don't exactly attract hordes of holidaymakers, so after leaving those books unupdated for many years, the publisher has now decided to dump them together in this new edition (272 pages).
The result is basicallly a new, much slimmer guide to Papua New Guinea, with fewer than 30 pages on the Solomons (where it only actuallly covers half the country even nominallly).
Not only has much of the detail been thrown out, the quality of information has also gone downhill sharply! :-(
The authors have very obviously never visited even major tourist destinations of PNG described in the book - as confirmed by owners of accomodations included in it, who told me they had merely received phonecallls from the author who didn't even visit most of the Sepik Region or the Highlands, for example!
Much of the "updating" seems to have been done by surfing the web, & as a result the book abounds in recommendations for expensive, upmarket places & tour-operators that do have websites, while completely ignoring cheaper, budget guesthouses which have no info on the net. Even excellent, smalll locallly owned places that were in previous editions of the PNG guide are conspiciously missing! And as for what the authors consider "budget": their itinerary recommended for budget travellers includes staying at a 150 USD/night resort!
This book is a real shame to Lonely Planet.
If you are planning on resort-hopping on a short holiday, it will be sufficient, but if you want to explore these two countries in depth without spending a fortune, you are far better off trying to find copies of the now out-of-print old editions, which still contain far more useful information than this new guide.
Search Amazon using the ISBN numbers 0864424027 for the old PNG guide, & 0864424051 for the Solomon Islands one.
