On the Road

Let’s Go is a budget guidebook mostly sold in the United States, as it’s written by Harvard students and marketed mostly towards popular destinations for young Americans – especially Western Europe and the Americas.

The guides read a little more livelier than the Lonely Planet, and can be slightly more risqué – to the extent that one edition on South America read “Cochabamba is the best place to get cocaine in Bolivia.”

As usual the guide contains train and bus schedules and hostel listings. It’s pretty much the same thing as LP, with not as good maps, and targeted more towards students than budget travelers in general.

The major flaw with Let’s Go is it causes the same hordes of backpackers swamping destinations as the Lonely Planet – but, as the readers are primarily Americans out of their country for the first time, the result is not pretty.

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