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Brierly guide book a hindrance?
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[QUOTE="ToilingMidget, post: 169452, member: 22070"] I found the Brierley guide useful, with reservations. I liked the maps, even though they were very simple. It was helpful to know how far it was to the next town or water supply. I also liked the information he gave about sites to see along the way. I was frustrated by his less-than-realistic descriptions of trail conditions in some places (as the previous poster said, "steep climb through pleasant woodlands" to describe rough, very steep terrain.) The book is too heavy and too big because of all the historical descriptions, mystical stuff, repeating his prose in other languages, pages for your notes, etc. After a few weeks, I saw only the book's flaws, but after someone stole my copy in Ponferrada, I realized how much I had depended on the maps. I tried to buy another one, but no Spanish bookstores I found had this book or any other English camino guide until I reached O Cebreiro, where I found the English Michelin guide for the camino. The Michelin guide is the one I'll use next time - it doesn't weigh much, but has the maps, elevation changes, and lists of lodging by town. And even though I missed knowing where I was at all times after my book was stolen, and was a bit scared of that not-knowing, I got along fine without knowing where I was. The camino is well-marked; everything worked out just fine. I did not follow Brierley's "stages" - I walked as much or as little as I wanted. I never made any reservations, and only once did I have to walk on to the next town because of no vacancies where I had hoped to stop. The people I walked with did not seem to be slavishly following Brierley's recs, although most of the English-speakers had a copy. I did find that I had to calibrate his recommendations after a couple of unfortunate incidents (one of them a sexual assault that resulted in the arrest of a hostel worker): when he raved about some place, calling the proprietor a "friend to pilgrims", etc., I realized that meant "run the other way - run fast, run far." I don't know how this happened - maybe the information is old, or maybe, like some restaurant critics, the owners know who he is, so he gets really good treatment. There are so many variables that it's hard to guess why there was so much discrepancy between his experience and what I experienced. The book is not the camino, as others have said. Since I walked on to Finisterre, I also bought his Camino Finisterre guide. This was not a very good book, much worse than his Camino guide. His description of how to get out of Santiago and its suburbs was very poor - we were lost for a couple of hours. The trail is poorly marked through these suburbs, and most of the locals also didn't know where the trail was, so some good directions for this section are very necessary. His directions were so bad that I wondered if he had actually walked this route. And once you are lost, his maps are so simplistic that they are useless. He has taken three pages of maps and turned it into a $20 book by adding lots of historical filler and translations of all this filler into Spanish. The historical info was interesting, but I didn't want to carry it around with me. I wish he had spent more time making the directions accurate. [/QUOTE]
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