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It's midnight and you're lost in the middle of Mumbai, marinating in your own sweat.

All you want is a clean, safe and preferably friendly place to stay and when you've found that you want to know where you can find the best curry and the liveliest bar.

You need to know this quickly too, because thanks to your backpack the locals have gathered around you to embark on a quest to part you with your rupees.

So you reach for your trusted travel guide for help.

Or do you?

You see, as someone who has travelled regularly that's exactly what I would have done, but recently a number of things have changed my mind.

Firstly there was the Lonely Planet author who confessed to being somewhat economical with the truth in the guides he wrote in. He admitted that after romping with a waitress his review of the restaurant said that the service was "friendly."

Clearly it was and I didn't have a problem with that.

However, what I did have a problem with was that he wrote a chapter about Colombia without actually going. I could have done that from my bedroom.

By contrast the Rough Guide editors have visited Bournemouth, but I hardly recognise it from what they have written.

As I reported when the Rough Guide to England came out last week, they gave Bournemouth quite a drubbing, describing it as "the epicentre of a monotonous conurbation between Lymington and Poole."

You can see where the "rough" in Rough Guide comes from.

I was born and raised in the West Midlands, in a place that best fits the description of a "monotonous conurbation" and the very reason I moved to Bournemouth was because it was everything the Midlands wasn't.

Among other things I was lured by the beaches, the sea, the parks and the surrounding countryside. The kinds of things that apparently make the people of Bournemouth the happiest in the UK.

Therefore I can only assume that the Rough Guides author spilt beer over his notes on English cities beginning with B, and inadvertently wrote the Bournemouth chapter with a combination of soggy scribblings about Bradford and Birmingham.

And it got me thinking.

If the guide writers can't even deliver accurate information about a big town like Bournemouth, then how reliable are their facts going to be on the best place to eat in a fishing village in Vietnam?

How can we be sure we're not going to wind up staying above a brothel in Colombia?

Or inadvertently eating a dog in Korea?

Well sadly it seems we'll have to take what they tell us with a pinch of sand.

However, that said there is a silver lining in all of this. After everyone has read the latest edition of the Rough Guide to England, there'll be a lot more elbow room on the beach.

7:00pm Thursday 15th May 2008

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