Lonely Planet Diving & Snorkeling Belize (Lonely Planet Diving and Snorkeling Belize)

Second, the book has no information on costs or other logistical aspects of a dive trip. For example, it mentions that Dangriga is the departure point for diving certain reefs, but doesn't tell you that there are no dive shops in Dangriga: to do any diving around there, you have to go thru an out-of-town resort, which is highly inconvenient.

Third, the capsule descriptions of 66 specific dive sites -- the heart of the book -- don't tell you anything meaningful and are irrelevant anyway because dive shops, not customers, choose which sites are visited. (Customers can choose which area they want to go to, but the dive shops select the specific sites within that area.)

Finally, although the book was updated in June 2002, it ignores the fact that in October 2001, Hurricane Iris devastated the sourthern diving hub of Placencia. The reefs in this area are heavily damaged and therefore not worth visiting. The failure to update the book to account for this major development can only be explained by bad faith on the part of Lonely Planet, which should be ashamed to have put such a lousy product on the market.


Save your money   January 5, 2003
J. Lynch (Tahoe, CA USA)
42 out of 42 found this review helpful

This book is not worth buying. It provides very little information on specific dive sites. I did not use the book once to make a dive choice during two weeks in Southern Belize. A good dive book for Belize is really needed - it was difficult to locate good dive operators for some areas...but this book was of no value.

It does have some nice pictures and a very basic fish/coral guide in the back.


Better than nothing.   January 24, 2007
TCL (Guilford, CT USA)
While I agree with the previous 2 reviewers. I did find the book helpful as a brief and very general overview of what was available and what there was to see in those dive areas. It put the areas in geographical perspective for me and was a nice addition to the dive briefing. After the dive, the fish ID part was a nice memory jogger for doing my logbook entries.

However, it does not help with planning a dive or a dive trip. You can get more info on that free from websites, magazines and dive tour specialists.

Overall better than nothing if you're into filling out your logbook.


Not so informative...   January 29, 2007
B. Divjak (Croatia)
This is a fair book, but loads of sites are missing (from this edition at least) and much of the information I expected to find was not in it - particularly the prices and quality of the various diving shops. It is a mere overview of what you find under the sea, with little on how to actually get to that point.


Misleading names   February 19, 2007
A. Grace (Broomfield, CO United States)
It is a good overview book, but when we got to Belize realized that a lot of the sites that are listed are not called by the same name at all - so hard to determine what sites we had really dived compared to the book. Also it covers a lot of area in Belize (if you are going to Ambergris Caye then maybe 1/2 or 2/3 of the book is useful).