Frommer's Istanbul Day By Day [Paperback]

Just back from Istanbul and consulted several guide books to plan my trip (including the peerless Moon Guide to Istanbul and the Turklish Coast). This one---Frommer's Istanbul Day by Day--seemed the best of the bunch while I was planning my trip. Afterall, it was organized around neighborhood walks in various parts of the city. The maps looked clear and the walks took one , on paper, past interesting sites. However, my assumptions were off base. The walks were horribly planned.

My experiences in the city using Frommer's Istanbul Day-by-day are based on following a few of the walks religiously (read 'stupidly and naively trusting the author') until I realized the walks were terribly misguided and I was missing out on the best things in the city. Luckily I found a friendly garbage can to lighten me of this burdensome load.

Two examples should help clarify my point---

I took the Eyup walk with my wife. The high point (literally) of this walk was the hike up the cemetery hill to Pierre Loti restaurant--wonderful and a must do for any visitor to Istanbul. The walk started here. All of the other guidebooks give directions to this walk to Pierre Lotti, so Istanbul Day by Day did not offer anything new here. What was disastrously unique was the rest of the walk which had my wife and I walking along a dusty traffic-jammed loud dirty street with the promise of arriving at the Theodosian walls (which could have been reached from other directions walking much more pleasantly). This might have been bearable had the walk not sent me against a expressway without a crossing. I was lucky in that it was rush hour and so was able to cross 12 lanes of traffic on foot--holding my hand out like a traffic cop-- because of the congestion. I have never done that in my life ---imagine trying to cross a major freeway--prior to two miles of horrid traffic and noise to end like that---what a walk!

I also, stupidly assuming the one walk was a fluke, took the ferry to Uskadur and did the book's walk there. Again the starting point at the ferry was nice enough but the walk directed me through backstreets, not filled with local charm as promised, but filled with noisy blocks and blocks of used water heater and washing machine vendors--it seemed like a cut above walking thru a city junkyard.

It was then that I threw the book away. I switched to using the Moon guide and the city opened up and became charming and beautiful. The traveler's experience all depends upon who is giving the advice, a friend or an idiot.

Don't misunderstand me ---Istanbul can be a beautiful and enchanting city with lot of great walks but you wouldn't know it from this book. Don't get burned as I did.

One afterthought---most of the positive reviews are based upon the book's abundant maps rather than the actual advice given by the book. The maps turned out to be outdated, especially the subway map...which caused me a great deal of difficulty until I got a current map in Istanbul. It turns out that the best maps are readily available in the hotels and not in the guidebooks.

Be very wary of Amazon travel book reviews unless the reviewer actually tried to follow the book...therein lies the rub, dear Horatio!

I went to Istanbul for a week and I brought two guidebooks (this one and the Rick Steves' Istanbul) and two language books. This book had everything I wanted to see, but I found that the other book was more readable and generally more rounded. I appreciated the maps, which were all quite clear, but when I got to Istanbul I found that I needed something more detailed (with all the small side streets named), so I acquired a full street map. This basically sums to the fact that, for information about the sites, I used a different book, and for information on how to get to the sites, I used a different map. So, overall, I ended up hardly using the book at all.

The one very useful feature of this book, and the only reason I carried it around every day, was the small, clear, and concise public transportation map which flipped out from the cover. I can hardly express how useful this was for getting around the city, but as this was hardly the main thrust of the book, I don't think it should change my rating much.

I do think that some of the "themed" tourist information would be of interest to certain people, but I personally didn't use it.

I used this on my honeymoon as my "carry around" book. It was great for thumbing through to see what the must-do activities were in whatever neighborhood we ended up in. We followed several of the Neighborhood Walks to see some road less travelled types of highlights.