Guide books: Insight Guides stand out

In the hugely competitive and oversubscribed travel-guide market, Insight Guides stand out as something quite different. These books, produced in association with television's Discovery Channel, are more akin to travelogues than to standard guides packed with information. Yet they are not coffee-table books in either size or format.

Insight also produces maps, phrasebooks, travel dictionaries and a huge range of nation, city and special-interest guides.

You can get a good idea of the quality of the range by checking out Insight Guide New Zealand, by Craig Dowling (APA Publications, $44.95).

Another delight from Insight Guides in its Discovery Travel Adventures series is Australian Outback, edited by Scott Forbes (Discovery Communications, $34.95). It will make your feet itch.

Trailblazer guides occupy another guidebook niche, a cross between a guidebook and a trekker's field guide.

Trekking in the Moroccan Atlas, by Richard Knight (Random House, $54.95), is perhaps the only guide you'll buy in New Zealand on the subject. But if you are taking your boots to Morocco it is all you are likely to need.

Likewise Trailblazer's Trans-Siberian Handbook, by Bryn Thomas (Random House, $69.95), deserves its plaudits from Conde Nast Traveler - if not its hefty New Zealand cover price.

Thailand Oracle, by Jim Rickman (Jim Rickman, $30), promises to be a down-to-earth guide for independent travellers.

Among the box full of Lonely Planet new editions to arrive recently was the second edition of Europe on a shoestring, various writers (Lonely Planet, $55). It's many years since you could travel in Europe on $5 a day, but this guide is full of useful suggestions on how to save money.