Departures: Guides galore

THE AUTUMN harvest of guidebooks includes plenty of new titles. Andalucia: the Rough Guide ( pounds 8.99) gives a thorough run-down on Spain's southernmost territory ('the part of the Iberian peninsula that is most quintessentially Spanish') plus Gibraltar, where 'Eating is a bit of a loss, and expensive by Spanish standards'.

Pacific Northwest: the Rough Guide ( pounds 9.99) begins shakily with advice on flying to Seattle and Vancouver: its suggestion that you are better off with an Apex ticket than a standby may be correct (standby tickets have not been available for at least 10 years) but you should be able to beat Apex prices on transatlantic flights by looking through newspaper advertisements for good deals. Once into its stride, however, the book provides a lively sprint from Oregon to Alaska via British Columbia.

Lonely Planet's latest haul includes a Prague City Guide ( pounds 5.95), which warns of increasing crime in the Czech capital. Prague's worst street for car thefts, it says, is Manesova, which the locals have nicknamed Bermudovsky trojuhelnik ('the Bermuda Triangle').

For those heading further afield, Lonely Planet has brought out a Cantonese Phrasebook ( pounds 3.50) and a second edition of its Travel Survival Kit to Rarotonga & the Cook Islands ( pounds 6.95), said to be 'like Tahiti as it was 20 years ago'.

One curious feature of all these books is that none uses the new UK telephone codes which have been in operation for the past month. As a result, the British numbers they quote will be obsolete from next Easter.