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Lonely Planet Guidebooks
The perennial favourite of Australians travelling anywhere, and even a good proportion of the rest of the travelling population these days is Lonely Planet. We tend to purchase one of these for most places we go, as they tend to provide pretty candid information and out of the way places to check out, as well as good hints and tips. You can get the usual country overview book, or for Canada you can actually get great state or area specific books too. A few of these of interest to the travelling Aussie are: British Columbia, Banff, Jasper and Glacier National Parks if you are planning on hitting up the ski slopes or anything else up there, and Montreal.

You can also get more specific too, with the city guides, like Vancouver and Montreal & Quebec City.

Rough Guides
I would also put the Rough Guides collection in the same area as the Insight Guides, as they are great to read beforehand. An example is that we’re off to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico this Christmas, and I’ve already read the majority of the Rough Guide to Yucatan, but we’ll be taking a Lonely Planet Yucatanwith us as well.

Insight Guides
Another quality product we’ve found for reading up on a place before you get there are the Insight Guides, who are affiliated with the Discovery Channel. What was recommended to us, and we’ve been following through with, is that the Insight Guides make a great read before you go somewhere, then you take the Lonely Planet guide with you.

The structure of the Insight Guide is a bit different to that of the Lonely Planet travel guides, in that they have a very solid section at the start of the guide that has a full history on the country, the people and the cultures, replete with colour pictures and maps. The Cuba one I have right here, for example, has the first 133 pages of a 377 page book devoted to this sort of information, then it will go through the areas individually giving histories, cultures etc, as well (of course) as the usual good places to eat, see & do.

Lonely Planet on the other hand is great once you are in an area and want detailed information on what you can do there – different tools for different times of your trip really, one for planning and background knowledge, and the other for good knowledge on the ground. Check out the Insight Guide for Canada. There is also a couple of city specific ones too, like the Vancouver one.

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