Guide.world: A compendium of travel guides | Hacker News Reader

Guide.world: A compendium of travel guides

guide.world

140 pointsfirloop25 comments

Looking at the author's work for West Africa, when is it a travel guide and not just a diary in travel guide format?

Though it's a bit frustrating to read how close he gets to some genuine understanding of how things really work in West Africa, and misses it in preference of expecting everything from a Western perspective. Noting a lack of tourists then bemoaning the difficulty of accessing few and lackluster tourist sites? OK, well, supply and demand work both ways.

Tourist sites and national parks across West Africa, where wildlife is very, very rarely the draw, are typically organized as jobs programs for whoever happens to be stuck in the area forbidden to be used for normal farming and village-life purposes. You don't pay a guide to guide you on an easy hike, you pay a guide to legitimize your presence in the community, to keep other people from bothering you, and to make sure that if you get bit by a snake or something, that you're not alone. That guide might simply be the young guy that speaks the best English in the village nearby and 99.9% of their time is spent living normal life doing things that have nothing to do with tourism.

All the friction the author notes is specifically employed as personal income generation, and it's odd how rarely does the author recognize that. Then they pay the universal "expedited visa" bribe in every country because they have mighty plans that no nation shall change.

For Switzerland, for someone who likes railways, I found this guide (missing from guide.travel) to be quite nice: https://www.seat61.com/train-travel-in-switzerland.htm

While planning the trip, I was annoyed by redditors on r/askswitzerland ending almost all replies by asking folks to download the SBB Mobile app. To my surprise, even though I'm not the kind to install apps (let alone Flutter apps), it was god-sent. So well made (their "design system" is open source: https://github.com/SchweizerischeBundesbahnen/design_system_...). Makes travel up and down the country, from Zürich to Lugano, from Genève to St. Gallen, from Basel to Campocologno, stress-free.

For tourists, TooGoodToGo.com (mystery meals) & SwissTopo (trails) are equally neat.

For the wiki version, you have https://www.wikivoyage.org

It can be a bit outdated, but then you just update it as you do your research ;)

A good lot of them seem to be from Matt Lakeman, whose writing I highly recommend. He goes into detail about history, politics, and tries to understand why things are the way they are in the places he travels.

The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/

Read his take on Spain. If all his guides are the same... Better don't read them. As libertarian (he is the one mentioning it I did not have to look for it), he spends too much text -wrongly- analyzing the politics. His comment about socialized healthcare is an example of someone having "only one appointment per month" as a big failure of the system, that's rich coming from someone from the Country in which people die because they have to ration their insulin. And apparently Spain is more radical because communists get a few seats every election, but somehow America is less radical despite 30% of the population consistely supporting the fascists. He notes the far-right party without realizing that their platform is almost 1 to 1 to American Republicans... And I am going to stop there, but his takes in general are awful.

I like to collect old travel guides to places that don’t really exist anymore. A few interesting ones I have are Polish-language guides to the USSR and Yugoslavia, and a multi-lingual guide from East Germany for shipping organizations dealing with western countries. It has basic nautical phrases in 8 or 9 languages.

They are the kinds of books that aren’t re-printed and usually aren’t worth digitizing either.

Yeah, amazing what's not easy to find.

I recently found out about the ancient roads in China. These days they are hiking paths. I'm quite used to handling myself alone with a GPS track, I don't want a guide. I found one book that it's not remotely clear if it's got what I want as it's discussing much of China and it's old enough I'm not sure what the mapping info will be like.

You'd probably be better off not trying to navigate using GPS in China in the first place, given the whole mapping situation there.

Most popular hiking apps (Gaia GPS, AllTrails etc.) support the standard used in China, do you think people just navigate with paper maps there?

AllTrails couldn't find "Shanghai", but my subscription lapsed years ago. Gaia is what I use on the ground but it's about where you are, not about where the trail is.....but I'm finding one of the ancient roads. A bit of a mess but it looks viable.

GPS works properly in China, it's just the maps are a lie. If someone made a .gpx of a trail someone else could use it. The line is pointy and a bit disjoint so I suspect someone uploaded points to Open Street Map.

You made me curious and I found this article detailing some background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

Thx, great read about Yemen from Maciej Cegłowski https://idlewords.com/2014/07/sana_a.htm

The Dominican Republic one is really detailed and surprisingly accurate, down to the pig on the moto! Come visit again soon :)

https://mattlakeman.org/2021/11/08/notes-on-the-dominican-re...

I wrote my own piece about South Korea / Seoul: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/south-korea-travel-guide

Felt like it's worth sharing here!

Craig Mod is great for Japan https://craigmod.com/ !

One of my favourite writers. I fully recommend him.

For Seoul, I think this is an interesting observation:

  Seoul is not a pretty city, at least not by most Western standards of beauty.
  It is a sprawling, haphazard mix with little apparent cohesion beyond a shared culture.

Personally, I really liked it because it has a different vibe from a more "sterile" city like Tokyo.

Seoul is such a huge place with tons of different areas that each could be a city by itself.

Edit:

I just checked the (sadly paywalled) beginning of the article and the author also says:

> [...] alley of small apartments and trucks selling garlic, the next you’re in a modern business park so sterile it feels like a doctor’s office.

- Another travel guide with absolutely no mention of India on it anywhere

- You guys really need to see the Lavie and Ollie series they did on India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1SJc2CyIek&list=PLefdZaa6fW... They did a 10000 km road trip across multiple videos.

- It ll blow your mind how a single country has a desert, a tropical forest, snowfall and more

It's just an aggregator, if you have anything good to contribute why not just follow the link in the footer? "Please send further submissions..."

Thanks for pointing out, yes I've been watching their videos lately and I must say they have covered almost every place in India on bikes.

Cool website, might want to change the icon from the current lovable icon.

What is the benefit of writing a negative travel guide for a place? And then the choice to list one in a compendium. The second guide for the farow islands is depressingly bad.

It looked cool, and I thought that it might be a new community where articles belong to this site. But when I clicked two articles, Seoul and Singapore, both were behind paywalls. So it seems it's just an aggregation of internet articles it seems?

Anything for India and Nepal?

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