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The Internet has long been packed with travel resources offering a mind-boggling range of information that aims to make travel planning that little bit easier. Despite this, the sheer volume of information out there is almost enough to make you wish you’d never heard of Machu Picchu and had headed off for a nice weekend somewhere closer to home instead.
Thankfully, there are developments in e-tourism that are helping us to cut through the vast amount of information and access some genuinely handy travel advice. This latest trend focuses on the guidance of local experts. It makes sense: instead of reading what a single guidebook writer thinks about a destination, why not take the advice of someone who is actually living there?
Well, it sounds fine in principle, but only if these locals are the experts they claim to be. So here is the definitive test, pitting the old-school (a trusty Lonely Planet) against the middle school (sites such as TripAdvisor based on user-generated reviews of hotels, services and destinations) against the new kids on the block; a local expert resource called Localyte. Let’s see how they hold up when exploring Peru For Less‘ hometown of Lima.
Plaza de Armas, Lima, Peru
PAPER CHASE: Lonely Planet guide to Peru
Ok, so they’ve got a very big, very comprehensive website and they’ve done well to break away from their paper-based origins with downloadable chapters, online advice forums and so on, but judging by the swarms of backpackers traipsing through downtown Lima, South America on a Shoestring in hand, the good old guide book is clearly still their bread and butter.
And even after years of traveling with them, these guidebooks can still amaze with the sheer volume of detail that is packed into several hundred well organized pages. But perhaps this can also become a problem? Page space in a book is finite by definition and with sales in mind, those hard working authors are presumably compelled to focus down on the most generic and universally appealing places. Leafing through the Lima chapter of Peru (2007) by Lonely Planet reinforces the hunch. This is a city of 1,000 square miles and is home to almost eight million people – it’s safe to assume that there is more going on in town than the seven neighborhoods mentioned in the book.
For instance dining in Lima is a much more varied scene than the book lets on. Limited by the requirement that contributors personally visit every restaurant, café and snack bar mentioned in the guide, what hope have they got of catching those neighborhood gems that are tucked away off the regular gringo trail? The district of Chorillos is a perfect example.
This place is massive; with the population of a small British city, a long and distinguished history, reasonable beaches, panoramic views of the entire bay, and some astounding restaurants to boot. There is El Hornero, a grill which serves up steaks so tender they’d impress an Argentinean, then there is the legendary Sonias, a local favorite and typical picantería which specializes in spicy fish dishes. And how about El Salto del Fraile, where diners are treated to the best view in town while they feast on such not-so-Peruvian dishes as Dijon lobster and Normandy chicken, flambéed with mushrooms in apple brandy.
Sure, no one wants a guide book the size of the Yellow Pages but limited space means that the restaurant listings for this, one of the finest dining cities in the world, are restricted to just five short pages. The infinite world of the Internet should offer an additional insight. How all that user generated content compares with the well-researched quality of a guide book is another matter entirely.
THE USER REVIEW: TripAdvisor
First thing’s first, all three of the above restaurants are on TripAdvisor, along with reviews, opening times and links to their menus. In fact, the website has the details of over 250 Lima restaurants, along with hundreds of hotels and some handy maps to show you how to get there.
TripAdvisor is a review site fuelled entirely by actual users of these services. By relying entirely on expressly non-expert opinion, it gives you a great idea of which hotels to avoid and which restaurant to book in advance, and the more people that rate a service, (they claim to have more than 20 million traveler reviews,) the more representative its average score will be. But where it falls down is on the non-commercial aspects of a destination. There are only so many hotel and restaurant reviews you can read, what if you want some advice on a pleasant neighborhood to just spend some time absorbing the atmosphere? And more importantly, where do you look to find this information?
In Lima that special escape location would be Barranco. A former holiday retreat for the city’s affluent elite, this small district has since been consumed by the ever growing city and has been turned into a calm bohemian oasis in the middle of this enormous urban sprawl. The area’s faded grandeur, leafy, traffic-free streets and shabby bars that haven’t changed for decades have become a magnet for the city’s alternative communities, performing artists and night time revelers.
A visitor could spend weeks in Barranco and still come across new experiences every day; sunset over the unbearably romantic Bridge of Sighs, an impromptu gig in a back street bar or the screening of some obscure film in the local independent cinema. This is the sort of place that people visit and end up staying forever, but how do you rate that on a review website? How do you provide a guide to the unexpected in a book? To find the hidden side of a destination, perhaps you need to call in an expert.
Barranco, Lima, Peru
ENTER THE EXPERTS: Localyte
Aside from the blogosphere, whose vastness can make using blogs impractical for rapid holiday planning, the local expert niche has so far gone unfilled in the world of e-tourism. Thankfully, a few sites have recently sprung up which aim to give the holiday maker a direct link to one or more locals who are willing to share their insider knowledge with visitors.
Localyte.com is a forerunner of this new trend, where getting the answers you need is as simple as sending an email. Your email is sent to a network of hundreds of local guides who have signed up to offer their advice. Some of these members offer paid-for travel services but others are simply individuals who have some knowledge and want to share it. The incentive for them is a clever points system, rewarding members who give frequent useful answers, meaning that the user can expect dozens of replies from helpful Localytes.
A similar, but much smaller, more personalised and non-commercial Peru guide is Your Peru Guide, which offers free, independent and customised tips and advice.
A vague query on “seeing sides of Lima that aren’t in the guidebooks” for instance yielded more than 50 separate responses, including from a museum curator inviting me on a personal tour, an NGO offering a visit to one of the city’s many slums and a film fan suggesting the screening of a documentary on punk in the third world. Along with a few pitches from travel agencies and professional guides, the responses were swift, thoughtful and helpful. In fact, three weeks later and with answers still trickling into my inbox, the only drawback is working out how to turn the thing off.
So it seems like the most ideal situation would be to use all three, depending on your specific need and stage in the planning process. Does local expert innovation really represent the best alternative to traditional sources of travel information? In short, no. If you need the number for your embassy or the low down on tipping traditions, nothing beats the good old guidebook, while review sites like TripAdvisor are spot on for user-based critiques of specific services, restaurants and hotels. Rather than replacing these totems of travel planning, the local expert upstarts are best when used as supplementary information, an unbeatable way to get under the skin of your destination and seek out something to really make your travel unique. As time goes on, this relatively small world of e-tourism will only continue to grow, making information negotiation increasingly complicated and possibly spawning even more information organization sites. We have given you our own assessment, now its time to make your own test! Good luck!
Localyte, the local expert guide
BEST OF THE GUIDES: A selection of Lima’s highlights taken from the Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor and Localyte.
Barranco district, south of glitzy, commercial Miraflores, is well known for its alternative cultural scene and is dotted with artist workshops, galleries and unmarked bars. Catching the sunset from the ocean facing cliffs is a must and a jar of beer in the legendary Juanito’s or a taste of Peruvian cinema in El Cinematografo are both great ways to spend an evening. Take a taxi from Miraflores for around 5 soles or catch any southbound bus labeled Barranco.
For the best steak in town head for El Hornero on Malecon de Chorrilos, south of Miraflores & Barranco. Get there by cab for 5-10 soles from Miraflores depending on your negotiating skills. Open 12pm – 12am.
Lima’s historical centre is complete with all the usual Latin American trimmings; a grand presidential palace and imposing cathedral focused around the Plaza de Armas, a classical colonial square. For something really unusual, head to the nearby Monastery of San Francisco where the unearthed remains of thousands of dead Peruvians can be found deep in the monastery’s eerie catacombs.
For a birds-eye-view of the historical centre and a warts and all picture of how most Peruvians live, take a cab (for the sake of safety) through the impoverished neighborhood of Rimac up to the view point of Cerro San Cristobal, a huge illuminated cross that dominates central Lima.
Category: Peru
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