Walkabout: The Australian Travel Guide provides descriptions,
attractions, and the like for 1,500 cities and towns, as well as regional
information, tips, Traveller's Tales, and more.
TravelChinaGuide
www.travelchinaguide.com
TravelChinaGuide has descriptions for more than 80 cities on
mainland China, plus information on hotels, dining, and attractions for
some cities.
For any city, take advantage of the wealth of practical information
and insights that can be found in the discussion groups (discussed at
the end of this chapter). Discussion groups are excellent places to
identify charming out-of-the-way little villages where you may be the
only tourist in sight. They may also help identify villages where there is
good reason there are no other tourists in sight.
Guides to Particular Attractions
You don't have to wait until you walk into a museum to get a guide.
Particularly if your time is very limited, knowing exactly where to go
once you enter the building means you can spend more time enjoying
the attraction and less time trying to find your way around. The same
applies to thousands of other sights and attractions around the world.
Once again, a general Web search engine will often be the quickest
and easiest way to locate these guides online. For many (maybe most)
places, just searching on the name of the place will be enough to find
the information you need, and the official Web site for that attraction
will often be the first item on the results page. If that doesn't work, add
the word "guide" to your search.
Museum sites will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9,
"Exploring Countries and Cultures Online," but in the meantime, if you
The Traveler's Web 58
want to get a sampling of online museum guides, look at the following
sites for the Louvre and the Uffizi.
Louvre
www.louvre.fr
Just as the Louvre is a world leader when it comes to museums, its Web
site is also a leading example of what a museum site can provide. Not only
will you find information about visiting the museum (hours, admission fees,
etc.), but you will find virtual tours and previews of what you can see there.
Click on the English link for the English version of the site.
Uffizi Gallery
www.uffizi.firenze.it
In case you don't read Italian, you will find a link for the English ver-
sion at the bottom of the main Uffizi site. On either version, you will
find information on when and how to visit the Uffizi, plus information
on events and exhibitions.
There are many specialized travel guides on the Web, some of
which will be covered in Chapter 8, "Sites for Special Groups and
Special Needs," but in the meantime, the following site is a good
example of a very "specialized" travel guide.
Roadsideamerica.com: Your Online Guide
to Offbeat Tourist Attractions
www.roadsideamerica.com
This site features more than 7,000 Canadian and U.S. tourist attrac-
tions, including the Palace of Depression, toilet seat art, cow-chip
throwing contests, a 10-foot-tall turkey statue, a cypress knee
museum, the death mask of Pretty Boy Floyd, Iowa's largest frying
pan, and a coon dog cemetery, as well as classic sights, such as Wall
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