Fodor’s Israel (Full-color Travel Guide)
Full-color guide
• Make your trip to Israel unforgettable with illustrated features, 64 maps, and 265 color photos.
Customize your trip with simple planning tools
• Top experiences and attractions
• Helpful regional overviews
• Easy-to-read color maps
Explore Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the Galilee, and beyond
• Discerning Fodor’s Choice picks for hotels, restaurants, sights, and more
• “Word of Mouth” tips from fellow Fodor’s travelers
•
List Price: $ 24.99
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Buddy S
An Excellent Comprehensive Guide Book,
I have been to Israel twice, each time on a guided tour which included hotels and many meals at venues selected by the tour operators. Each day’s activities were usually long and exhausting, with little free time left to explore on my own. I was therefore interested to see what this Fodor’s publication might offer to a traveler on a guided tour, as well as to those who might want to spend their entire or most of their trip exploring on their own. The bottom line is that this is an excellent comprehensive guide book that should be useful to all travelers.
Israel is steeped in history, so there is a chapter early in the book titled “Israel Through the Ages” which quickly covers Israel’s history starting in the early biblical period from 2000 to 1000 BC and continues up to Israel today. Fodor explains the relevance of each period to the three major religions. Historical information is also provided later in the book in Fodor’s description of individual points of interest.
The book is divided into sections that discuss Jerusalem, Around Jerusalem and The Dead Sea, Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Northern Coast, Lower Galilee, Upper Galilee and the Golan, and Eilat and the Negev. Each of these sections gives a comprehensive rundown on what to see and do and where to eat and stay. The listings of suggested restaurants and hotels are comprehensive for the most part. Some sights, restaurants and hotels are highly recommended as “Fodor’s Choice.”
Fodor gives a list of Israel’s top attractions (or what not to miss) and gives suggestions of what to see if your interests run in a particular area, including Archaeology, The Great Outdoors, Desert Adventures and Sacred Spaces. There are also many color photographs and maps of each area. The book also has a glossary of basic Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic vocabulary.
If you are planning a trip to Israel and you are not taking a guided tour, I recommend that you take a look at this or a similar travel guide before you leave home. Israel is not a place to “wing it” after you arrive – if you do, you run the risk of missing something special.
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|Bold Consumer
Foder’s Israel for when you are planning to go there, wish you could go there, remembering your trip, and as a reference book,
Foder’s Israel is useful if you are planning a trip to Israel, wish you could go to Israel, for remembering your experience after your “Trip of a Lifetime”, or as a reference book for all sorts of useful information about Israel.
IMPORTANT NOTE: My personal most favorite part of this book is the very helpful list of words and phrases. You won’t be able to speak fluent Hebrew from that list, but you’ll know enough to enjoy the language, and most people in Israel speak English. You’ll also know quite a bit more than 99% of the tourists you’ll meet. I studied Hebrew for a couple of years before deciding to travel to Israel. The words and phrases they included in this book were excellent choices, just the ones you’ll need most. You will be glad you learned those particular words when you hear them crop up in conversations around you. It was great fun for me! Those who live there were surprised and pleased that I had made the effort to try to learn a little bit about their language. You don’t need to be an expert. Knowing just the list provided in this book will probably make your trip even more fun.
This is an excellent travel book for the area. Even the map on the inside of the first page is a helpful reference to the Old City in Jerusalem. More on why that is so important in just a minute. There is a great deal of information, so it is understandable that the print is fairly small. The book is packed with information helpful to those of all faiths, and some gorgeous, albeit small, pictures.
There is a one-page overview of the different parts of Israel, so you can plan your trip around those places you want to visit. The map on the next page references 7 areas and the chapters that cover them: Jerusalem, Around Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Northern Coast, Lower Galilee, Upper Galilee and the Golan, Eilat (recently in the news) and the Negev.
The “Israel Planner” has sections on Getting Here, Getting Around, Driving Distances/times in Israel, Dining, Lodging, Renting A Car, and When to Go. There is important information on those 2 pages.
“Israel Made Easy” covers customs of the country, eating out, greetings, the Jewish Sabbath, Language, Money and Shopping, Safety, and visiting sacred sites. You’ll probably want to dress appropriately for certain sites and on certain days. I did, and was surprised to see that it was noticed and appreciated by locals of all faiths.
Next there are descriptions of Israel’s top attractions along with small, but helpful, pictures of those sites. This is followed by more insight into the culture of Israel.
I loved the section about “IF YOU LIKE…” Archaeology, The Great Outdoors, Desert Adventures, and Sacred Spaces, the different sites you might specifically enjoy.
There is enough about the people, religion, and state so the traveler will be informed. For example, I would have found it helpful to have read this brief section so I could have known a little about the Bedouin and Druze cultures, unfamiliar to me before I went, but which turned out to be fascinating!
The section on “Israel’s Top Experiences” is especially helpful for independent travelers, since the choices for those traveling in groups or tours have already been made for us. In my case we still got to do almost all of those things and I could have arranged to do others had I wanted to use some of the down time (which I used to rest, because we covered so much that any spare time to rest was welcome). Lodging options are given, but again, that’s only helpful for independent travelers or to check out the hotel arrangements your tour group has chosen. That comes in handy when your friends hear that you’re going to the Middle East and think you will be living in a tent in the desert eating locusts, as some of my friends wrongly assumed. I stayed in excellent hotels eating wonderful food and traveling on roads that were better than the pot-hole filled roads in my neighborhood at home. The weather was great in October when I went. It was not too hot at all, even in the desert. The book has information to help you choose the season to visit Israel. There are advantages to each season.
There’s a chapter about “Israel With Kids”, “Israel’s Major Holidays” (very important to know) are covered, and an overview of “Israel’s Main Markets”. This would be a MUST for those who are traveling independently, as would the section on “Israel’s Best Beaches”. There is a section on “Israel And The Performing Arts: Dance, Music, Theater, and Film.” There is a historical timeline: Prehistory, Early Biblical Period, United Monarchy, Second Temple Period, etc., with descriptions, art and photographs.
The maps of the Old City in Jerusalem would have helped me. I was disoriented at times about what I was seeing and where exactly we were, and we were moving fast, as most tours do.
Then…
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|LawyerMom
Pretty good stab at an impossible task,
Maybe I’m biased, but in my experience, people don’t travel to Israel for the same reasons they might travel elsewhere. In particular, the usual secular touristic motivations would point just about anyone somewhere else – beaches, hiking, museums, culture, food, pleasant locals, recreational pharmaceuticals, etc. As I understand things, unless they’re visiting family or on business, chances are the only reason most people go to Israel are: 1) they’re Jewish, and/or 2) they’re religious. It’s not a vacation so much as a pilgrimage.
What this means is that a substantial number of people, if not an outright majority of those visiting Israel as tourists, do so with a religious perspective and agenda that will color just about everything they see and do while they’re there. This presents a rather hefty challenge for a company like Fodor’s, trying to create an ostensibly one-size-fits-all travel guide for a country where there is hardly a one-size-fits-all tourist.
All things considered, however, this travel guide isn’t half bad. Leaving aside the obligatory nice photos, the guide’s best quality seems to be its real effort to be fair and non-judgmental. The methodology is fairly simple: speak about places and objects with historical precision, and whenever it becomes necessary to discuss an attraction or locale’s religious significance, give the relevant religion’s perspective in a reasonably authentic fashion that is both safely muted and non-snarky.
In the end, my advice is this: if you find yourself in Israel with this book, read it once, and if you can afford to, ditch the book and hire a guide. There’s a lot of them, many of them speak good English, and you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding one who is sympathetic to your particular religious agenda. You’ll learn a lot more, and it’ll feel that more more significant and resonant.
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