Ukraine, 2nd: The Bradt Travel Guide Paperback – Bargain Price, March 1, 2007

Want proof that Bradt's got Ukraine figured out? Look at the relative absence of other travel guides for this fascinating country. Lonely Planet does one, but then again, they'd probably publish a guide to the Moon. Rough Guides, Fodor, Frommer, Cadogan, Footprint... nada. Bradt's got the market on Ukraine, and there's a reason for that: This guide is really good.It is a travel guide in the truest sense of the word. There's a definite emphasis on pragmatic travel information, at the slight expense of cultural and historical context that some readers particularly enjoy. It's not a text-rich cultural guide, a la Rough Guides, but a directory of good places to spend your time and money. The best part? It's accurate and authentic. You have the locals in your hand with this book, and you're armed with the kind of information that will make your visit to Ukraine rich, rewarding and real. The book leaves most of the historic context for you to discover on your own, but it points you in the right direction so you're not overwhelmed. There's a 100-page introduction to the country that is particularly good. The authors have written this section as something of a "culture shock" essay intended to give you the real, irreverent portrait of the country, with plenty of concise information that makes you feel like you're ready to relocate to Ukraine. They've painted the picture perfectly.The truly startling city of Lviv, former capital of Polish Galicia, gets special treatment, and should be on every itinerary in Ukraine. Visitors from crystal-clear Scandinavia or baroque central Europe may wonder what all the Lviv hype is about. Here's the thing: It's not just about frilly architecture. It's about recognizing that Lviv was once an enormously diverse, poly-ethnic, Austro-Hungarian frontier town, and it's essentially intact. Prague may be cleaner, but it's also more homogeneous. Lviv's position on the margins, rather than in the center of everything, is the source of its intrigue. Go there.There's more to this difficult country than Kiev and Chernobyl. Get out and see the places preserved in a pre-communist time warp (such as Lviv) before the word gets out and they become another stop on the expensive Prague, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna tour.

The Lonely Planet guide was used by a pal of mine: it was completely horrible, practically worthless. This one is much better. The Author obviously at least likes the country he's covering here, and he's very knowledgeable about the local folkways, history and things to see and do.Downsides: the maps are horrible; often drawn in some bizarro Lovecraftian geometry which doesn't seem to correspond well to objective reality, they also lack Cyrillic, which makes them nearly useless in pointing to cabbies and finding your way around central and eastern Ukraine. The detail maps are even more useless: they often lack ... roads and landmarks! What is the point of the Lavra detail map, for example? It's just some dots on some vague streaks: no way of finding your way around there at all. Finding the Scythian Neopolis in Simferopol was also practically impossible, and the cabbies didn't know wtf I was talking about either. A lack of Cyrillic place names in the book is also unhelpful. My pronunciation of the places I needed to get to is going to be horrible, as is any other English speaking visitor, where it's at least transcripted Ukrainian, so it's often hard to get around. Sometimes the place name is actually given in English, which is even more useless (examples; Chernoseus in Sevastopol, the museum of traditional architecture in Kiev). One of the worst things about this book: in every city I went to, excepting Lviv, the restaurants recommended were almost 100% missing in action. Granted, there has been a lot of economic problems lately, but sticking the names into google and figuring out if they're still there seems like a reasonable thing to do in making the updates. I probably spent $100 in cab rides, and wasted hours on my trip looking for a recommended restaurant. After a while, I just started walking around and looking at menus, as well as chatting with what locals I could find: this worked better, but it's annoying when you're looking for something obscure, like Uzbek BBQ. He'd also occasionally miss out on important monuments and places of interest. For example, the Lviv cemetery was an amazing place: totally MIA in this guide. Fortunately, the otherwise horrible Lonely Planet guide mentioned the Lviv cemetery (which is arguably more magnificent than the one in Paris, and a definite "must see").Upsides: Lviv's information was mostly current (presumably his wife is from Western Ukraine), and as I said above, at least he likes the place, and seems generally well informed about the people, history and culture. The information on a first aid kit was also helpful: bring antibiotics -you will probably get bacterial dysentery. Don't know about bringing syringes; I didn't try, but he was right enough about the antibiotic thing, I probably will next time.I think the 2010 update was probably a partial update. It seems much of the information about the poverty of the place is out of date. It's still pretty rough there compared to, say, France, but it wasn't quite as "third world" as he made it out to be.

I absolutely love this book! I bought it and a copy of the Lonely Planet tour book to plan my two week trip to the Ukraine this summer. I haven't touched the Lonely Planet book since I started reading this one. This book is far more comprehensive than the Lonely Planet book, and I can't imagine planning my trip without it. It has so much information, and not just about sites to see. It has lots of information about the history and culture of the Ukraine, which is equally important to know when planning a trip abroad. The only drawback to this series is that they don't have a lot of books, when I looked for a book for Poland (also a part of my trip this summer), they didn't have one. Most of their books are about places that are off the beaten path.

I travelled for the first time to Lviv this month and used the Brandt guide that was definately the most detailed and up to date guide available. It provides alot of detail about culture, history and politics.On the ground the guide allows the traveller to access the main sights, although I would prefer better maps which tend to be too small and do not include all the sights I wanted to see. The style of english also is sometimes confusing....the lviv ghetto is remembered by the railway bridge on.... remembered near would have been better.A big help would be if the place names were also written in cyrillic, so you could point to them and ask someone where to go, hopeless in that regard in a place where latin script is not used.A good guide but even better if more pictures, detailed maps and better labelling.

Anticipating the journey is half the fun - you start to build a picture in your mind of the places you will be visiting. You wonder which restaurants you fancy eating in and what your hotels will be like, and how it will be to go on an overnight train from the Crimea. It feels a bit premature to review this book before testing its information in situ. However it has really helped me to prepare for what will be a lifetime adventure - retracing my family roots. I have been able to visit places in my imagination and feel a little familiar with this distant land. Perhaps I should write a second review on my return in a few weeks time - meanwhile I feel armed with lots of useful information which is well laid out, accessible and I'm ready to roll.

I recently travelled around Crimea with this guide book and my general impression is that it gives you very detail political and historical background to Ukraine but when it came to finding our way to sites the book didn't always help. When it came to trekking in the Demerdzhi mountains the book only talkes about 4 day trek and doesn't give any indication of times or difficulty levels of the parts of that trek which would definitely help those like us who were after a couple of one-day treks.As it is difficult to find many tourist information centres in Crimea, even if you speak some of the language and as all exhibitions are in Russian we relied on the guide book to tell us the story of the site which not always provided that information (though this may be a bit too high an expectation).The book was last updated in Jan 2007 so most of the prices have gone up since then, generally by around 50% for entrances and a bit less for hotel prices. There was one hotel in Sevastopol that was meant to have luxury and "standard Soviet" rooms, the latter being within our budget. It was a bit embarassing when we walked into the marbled reception area of the 3-star hotel with the minimum price being at least 3 times our budget... But after meeting some other backpackers who did exactly the same I assume the hotel crew must be used to this by now.I normally travel with a Lonely Planet guide and this was the first Bradt book I bought - overall I found this one lacking the detail a lot more often than the Lonely Planet.

The tone of this book is set by the table of contents being buried behind pages of glossy images and other bumph - practicality for the traveller supplanted by the inflated page count achieved with over 100 pages of historical background and generalisation, and verbose descriptions of towns and tourist attractions.The actual guide part of the book, 313 pages, does contain a lot of useful travel advice - details of hotels, transport advice, what to see and do. Confusingly the country map didn't reflect the organisation of the book.This book is suited to reading all about a place before deciding to go, but rather long-winded to lug from town to town.

Easy to read and well set out. Useful in finding information on the places visited. A very handy guide to have.