My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Guidebooks are of course an essen­tial staple of the inde­pend­ent trav­el­ler. We con­sul­ted three:

• Kerry’s Rough Guide to Greece which her broth­er got when he went to Greece a few years ago. Good descrip­tions of most of the places we went to.
• I was wor­ried that the Rough Guide would be a bit out of date, so I bought a cur­rent copy of  Lonely Planet Greece. It cov­ers all the ground, and the back­ground info on his­tory and cul­ture is great, but I found the descrip­tions of the islands frus­trat­ingly terse. (And of course, even the latest edi­tion of a guide book won’t be totally accur­ate. For example, Lonely Planet says there is no bus ser­vice on Kimolos, but one has star­ted since their research­er last visited.)
• Two days before we left Scotland, I picked up a 1999 vin­tage second-hand copy of Greek Island Hopping (pub­lished by Thomas Cook, makers of the mighty rail timetable) at Elvis Shakespeare, the most excel­lent second-hand book and record shop on Leith Walk in Edinburgh. (The guy in the shop was so excited when I bought the book, and star­ted remin­is­cing about his own Greek island travels. “You must vis­it Patmos…” A bit too far off our track, sadly!) For descrip­tions of the islands, this is by far the best of the bunch, and I brought pho­to­cop­ies of the rel­ev­ant pages. The ferry inform­a­tion was of course hope­lessly out of date. Another time though, I would prob­ably bring a copy of the latest edition.

The Thomas Cook timetable con­tin­ues to prove its worth — help us catch the earli­er train last night and get to Brasov at a reas­on­able hour and exhausted into bed…