Rough Guides: 25 Ultimate Experiences: Southeast Asia

#80
Title: Rough Guides: 25 Ultimate Experiences: Southeast Asia
Author: Rough Guides
Publisher: Rough Guides
Year: 2007
Genre: Travel guide
77 pages

This is one of a set of 25 mini-guides published by Rough Guides to celebrate their 25th anniversary. For general comments on the set, please see my review of Rough Guides: 25 Ultimate Experiences: Ethical Travel below.

This volume breaks out destinations as follows:
Borneo: 1
Cambodia: 2
Indonesia: 5
Lao/Laos: 1
Malaysia: 2
Phillippines: 4
Thailand: 6
Vietnam: 3
Cross-country river crossing (Thai-Lao): 1

This count corresponds pretty well to the level of development of the tourism infrastructure in each country. Destinations and focus cover a nice range of activities, with a good representation of history and contemporary culture. The write-ups of the activities I've done and places I've been seems pretty accurate. The "miscellany" in the last section provides useful information on food, festivals, and other cultural and tourist information. The "Literature" section seems strangely sparse, with no narratives of Cambodia (despite the inclusion of Tuel Sleng in the destinations). The language section also ignores both Cambodia and Vietnam.

Oddly, there's no discussion of the exclusion of Burma/Myanmar from the guide, though Rough Guides: 25 Ultimate Experiences: Ethical Travel discusses this obliquely in its brief "Human Rights" section. Also from an ethics perspective, it's interesting to read the Ethical Travel volume, then see Grand Hotel D'Angkor listed under "Five Fabulous Hotels" in the current guide. I've stayed at the Grand Hotel D'Angkor; it's a beautiful property, but the staff are dressed in costumes, the grounds are fumigated by drifting clouds of pesticide every afternoon, and one notices the lack of local ownership on the grand hotel row in Siem Reap. Rough Guides might want to think more about this sort of within-series discrepancy.