New Lonely Planet Wales Guide
The 2007 Edition of the Lonely Planet Guidebook to Wales is Now Out
From Welsh Castles to modern Cardiff, the Lonely Planet Wales guide covers everything Welsh: Snowdonia, Swansea, the Brecon Beacons and the best food and accommodation
My first foreign holidays were to Wales. When you grow up in the north of England, the north Wales coast is indeed a foreign country. They do things differently there. On a clear day we could see the Welsh mountains from my grandmother's house in Lancashire, and my first trips overseas – or more accurately over the River Mersey – were to spend a week in a caravan or a guesthouse in resorts like Rhyl, Prestatyn, Colwyn Bay and Gronant. Browsing through the new Lonely Planet Guide to Wales made me come over all nostalgic.
What a shame, then, to find that this entire stretch of the north Wales coast has been dismissed with a curt comment: 'Don't bother stopping at the tacky seaside resorts along the way.' Oh dear. I rather like tacky seaside resorts. They're very British. You couldn't write a guide to England and ignore Blackpool. Travel writers like Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux didn't ignore tacky seaside resorts when they wrote about Britain. The only town that merits a mention in the Lonely Planet Guide to Wales is Llandudno, so almost 40 miles of the north Wales coast from Llandudno to the English border is dismissed in a sentence.
I turned to Cardiff, which I've been to more recently than my childhood holidays in north Wales. Last year, in fact. Here the authors seemed to be spot-on. They were writing about the Cardiff I knew, and were up-to-date and accurate, and told me things about the city I hadn't discovered. I really felt they'd walked the streets, done the tours, visited the places and caught the vibe.
I have to fault the authors again when it comes to their review of Welsh literature, though. Here they say that 'the literary voices of Blacks and Asians in Wales are rarely heard.' It's obvious that the authors have never read the gritty Cardiff crime novels and non-fiction of John Williams. His linked collection of short stories, Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub, and several of his novels, give a very real voice to the contemporary Cardiff Black and Asian community.
The Lonely Planet Guide to Wales does pack a lot into its 356 pages. There's a long and detailed section on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, and the other beautiful parts of Wales like the Snowdonia National Park and the Brecon Beacons National Park are done justice. The colour photo spreads capture the magic of the country, and the practical information is as thorough as you'd expect from a Lonely Planet guide – you're even told how to avoid heat exhaustion, which is not something I've ever suffered myself when visiting Wales.
The 3rd Edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to Wales is published by Lonely Planet at £11.99 in the UK and $20.99 in the USA.
