Customer Rating:  
Summary: Currently the best guide to Namibia
Comment: Having spent a fair amount of time in Namibia we have collected almost every guide book there is and I have to say this is the one we use most. I like the layout more than the others and it is generally more informative and more up to date. A good all round guide book to this amazing country.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good but has a couple of issues
Comment: This review is based on a day or two looking at this book before our trip.
Most of this book is excellent. The wildlife side is strong, with a chart of the footprints of about 22 creatures, and a wildlife guide giving you information on about 70, including line drawings for about 40 of these. The general information about the country and what tourists need to know seems well-researxhed, as does the information about districts in the main body of the book, which includes many maps and points like recent street-name changes.
The quibbles:
First, the author clearly cares a lot about the Namibian environment, and there's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes it all gets a bit preachy: on the Rossing uranium mine we get "many will feel only too glad to leave this kind of suspect industrial 'development' behind in Europe". Why Europe should be singled out when there's suspect industrial development on most continents, I'm not quite sure. If you've told us already that it's a large open-cast mine, do we not have the wit to work out whether we want to see it? Likewise some of the suggestions that you should grill your tour operators about how they involve the locals in deciding what happens on your tour. Lovely idea, but how many readers will have been consulted about tourism in their city?
Second, the author runs a tour company called Expert Africa. When discussing tour companies, he declares this interest. But when telling you how their arrangements for car hire are better than anyone else's, Expert Africa are just "a UK-based company", rather than "my UK-based company", and this is followed up with "Their trips are flexible, good value, and well worth considering". I'm a bit disappointed that no editor at Bradt guides picked up on this and amended it appropriately before publication. I don't mind the author saying he thinks his outfit has the best deal - he just has to make clear that it's his outfit when he says so.
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