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18 Apr 2008
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On the other hand....
Graham Greene wrote a book titles "Journey without maps". This set me thinking how interesting it might be to bike say, to Istanbul from the UK without any map at all, and see what happened. This would replicate the way of the medieval traveller who had to ask often and hope that the directions were right. Of course, asking for directions to Turkey in France would not be helpful, as most of us know our local region only. I certainly couldnt tell anyone, even in a common language, how to get to a faraway country.
It would also bring us into closer contact with the people we meet, as we would need them more.
This concept would revolutionise how we travel. We'd need more time, for a start. If you excluded the use of a compass, then it really would be different....
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18 Apr 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Caminando
If you excluded the use of a compass, then it really would be different....
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Let's really go for it - travelling only when cloudy or dark.
Nice idea Caminando.
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19 Apr 2008
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A Late friend from New Zealand used to say he traveled the world by studying maps.
Myself I like to keep all my maps and they are covered with scribbles of places I camped and good tracks and routes I took.
They also include all the mishaps like were me and the CCM ended up at the bottom of a gorge in spain lucky for me a moutain biker helped me manhandle the beast back to a track.
Even better than real maps are the scrawls people draw when directing you when youre lost sometimes they make perfect sense and sometimes they are strange doodles that allow you to find new and interesting places that you never knew existed. (this is all getting a bit heavy I better go do some work)
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19 Apr 2008
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Great thread, I love maps as well, ever since I was a kid and was into Orienteering, even got to make maps for a few Orienteering events.
My wife hates maps - my fault as I always give her a hard time about having to turn the map around to look at it - reading a map is a definite skill that a lot of women lack (ducks swinging handbags).
One of my favourite maps is a photocopy of a hand drawn mining map I was given by a road train driver on the road into Innamincka in Australia. It covered the area down South to Tibooburra. It showed the "roads" (sand and gravel tracks) and all the "shot line" tracks put in for the mining exploration. There was also notations about sand dunes - easy, hard, no.
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19 Apr 2008
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Me too
Me too. I was lucky, 50 yers ago my scout master had been a map maker in the army, dashing about in the desert, Italy and Normandy in a scout car, so he taught us well. Trouble is you don't get a book of maps in OS detail that covers S.America, so my laptop and Garmin have to take over on the road.
The most interesting map I have seen was a stereoscopic one of a Greek island in Scientific American about 30 years ago I guess. It had green and red lines and you needed a pair of 3D glasses but it really brought the terrain alive, and the undersea terrain as well. I would think that for those to whom elevation lines are a mystery, this would have bought instant clarification.
No one seems to be against paper maps, oh and Caminando, despite all of the modern wonders strapped to my bike, I still seem to be wandering about in the dark....Signor, donde est la carreterre por favor? ....and why is the sun in the wrong part of the sky? My shadows pointing the wrong way! and who pinched Ursa Major?
I'm always amazed when I get to where I planned to be using the Garmin which is miles out sometimes, and also tells me there are roads where there are not, last week it told me to go back 79 miles, make a U turn and arrive at my destination half a mile up the road in 2 hrs!!! A paper map would reassure me loads.
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24 Apr 2008
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There be dragons here
My love of maps is so tied to my love of exploration it's pathological. The first maps that captured my soul where the ones in national geographic magazines. They, of course, showed the most remote, exotic and far away places. How could a boy of 10 resist a map where it was printed "There be dragons here".
Maps of jungles, oceans, abondoned civilizations, the moon, Mars; they all covered my bedroom walls at some point.
For me, maps are now like a good adventure book - only one to be lived not just read. Like a new bought book, it is crisp and unmarked. As the trip takes shape, the map grows gets new folds, marks and stains. Then during the trip it reflects the wear of thumb, road and sun. By the end, it is tattered, torn, and road weary - like me. And every time I pick up that treasured map, the trip floods back.
Now, my maps show me the places I want to make sure I visit, the best road to take, and where I'll stop at night.
However, every once in a while, I look for those places that so fascinated me in younger years (officially at old-fart-stage now). Those places that are blank. The places where there are no features, no roads, and no clues.
Those are the places, after all, where, "there be dragon".
Peace, and very pleasant daydreams,
Narly
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24 Apr 2008
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I sometimes wonder if my love of maps comes from the little ink drawn maps I often found in the hard back books about adventure that I read as a child. I'd pull down some dusty tome from my dad's bookshelf and open up the front cover and inside would be a map relating to the area in which the action happened. Often the maps would be sketches drawn by the author with annotations such as "Attacked by cannibals here." etc!
I particularly liked that these maps often represented things, rather than with symbols, with quite lifelike drawings. i.e. not contour lines, but a little drawing of a mountain, or a realistic representation of a river (complete with rapids and waterfalls) rather than a blue line.
I would always love being able to refer back to the map whilst reading the book, to see just where such and such an event happened, or how far they still had to travel to find the source of the river/hidden diamond mine/enemy encampment etc!
I have always sworn that if I ever get round to writing a book it will a have a sketch map in the front cover, complete with annotations, lines of long. and lat. and a little compass point in the bottom right hand corner!
Matt 
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*Disclaimer* - I am not saying my bike is better than your bike. I am not saying my way is better than your way. I am not mocking your religion/politics/other belief system. When reading my post imagine me sitting behind a frothing pint of ale, smiling and offering you a bag of peanuts. This is the sentiment in which my post is made. Please accept it as such!
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24 Apr 2008
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its all about the map
Matt,
dude, its all about the map...
given the choice of a GPS or a Map I would choose the latter every time..
Not only is it no doubt out of date and get lost/broken/torn but it gives so much more of an adventure, exploring random roads and markings...
my father on the other hand, is the exact opposite, swearing by his GPS..
weird hay?
would have thoughht the younger son, grown up on technology and the internet would be the opposite...
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24 Apr 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mikeb8man
Matt,
dude, its all about the map...
given the choice of a GPS or a Map I would choose the latter every time..
Not only is it no doubt out of date and get lost/broken/torn but it gives so much more of an adventure, exploring random roads and markings...
my father on the other hand, is the exact opposite, swearing by his GPS..
weird hay?
would have thoughht the younger son, grown up on technology and the internet would be the opposite...
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Now then - I think that GPS is much more likely to make you explore 'random' roads. We used our GPS for the first time in Portugal, and wow, it took us to so many tiny out of the way villages that we started to look forward to the randomness of where it would take us each day.
Not that I don't love maps, but don't rule out differenet ways to use the GPS too
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23 Apr 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Caminando
Graham Greene wrote a book titles "Journey without maps". This set me thinking how interesting it might be to bike say, to Istanbul from the UK without any map at all...
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That would be a great thing to do. You could make it a little easier by studying a map before you went and memorising some of the places you would pass through. That way you could say "Excuse me, can you tell me the way to Sheffield/ London/ Dover/ Paris/ Bern/ Milan/ Ljubljana etc..." working with road signs and sticking to non motorway roads. I bet you'd see places you'd never have seen otherwise.
Matt
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*Disclaimer* - I am not saying my bike is better than your bike. I am not saying my way is better than your way. I am not mocking your religion/politics/other belief system. When reading my post imagine me sitting behind a frothing pint of ale, smiling and offering you a bag of peanuts. This is the sentiment in which my post is made. Please accept it as such!
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6 May 2008
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I am a novice GPS guys and heading that way. But I will never give up "real" maps.
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Patrick passed Dec 2018. RIP Patrick!
Last edited by mollydog; 24 Mar 2009 at 19:16.
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6 May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mollydog
Lastly, most have never been more than 10 kms. from their home village.
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Unfortunatly this is true for most of the worlds population.
Dangerous places for Maps -
Morocco .. they don't like maps showing 'Western Shara' ... they consider it to be part of Morocco. And then there are other disputed places .. best not to display maps around those parts ...
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6 May 2008
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Oh, thank goodness I'm not the only one with a map fetish! I love looking at maps and remembering places I've been and things I've done there. You can look at somewhere you got lost and realise how easy it was to get back to where you needed to be instead of the thirty mile detour you took!!!
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6 May 2008
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map fetish
I think the map fetish might be common factor amongst our kind of travellers! I was born that way. I remember when was very young, 10 years old or so, reading books of the great explorers with on one side a world atlas and on the other side an encyclopedia! How about that for a predisposition
cheers,
Noel
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8 May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mollydog
This may be one reason folk learned other languages!? Asking directions?
In rural central Mexico (and many rural areas of Latin America) asking directions is always interesting. First off, few read. Secondly, they most likely have never seen a map, so pointing something out on a map is like ministering to the blind. 
Lastly, most have never been more than 10 kms. from their home village.
The one sure thing is they WILL tell you where you need to go .... even if it's totally wrong! 
So the trick is to find a trucker or someone who owns a vehicle and goes to town on a regular basis .... and speaks Spanish ... not an indigenous dialect.
We had three maps in Mexico. The bible (Guia Roji) the AAA map and another. None matched the other and none were correct. There is a reason for this. The Mex. govt. are not fond of maps and discourage any sort of accurate representation of geography matching reality. Other places in Latin America are the same. In Colombia I was arrested just for having maps.
In the US we don't get the many good maps like you get in EU and UK. The National Geographic ones are good and I traveled with them all over S. America.
When ever I find a nice map now, I color Xerox it onto good paper. Most US maps are crap and leave out stuff, are difficult to read and disintegrate shortly after purchase.
I am a novice GPS guys and heading that way. But I will never give up "real" maps.
Patrick  |
Yes what you describe comes towards the idea of a journey without maps - I'm thinking of your 3 map situation where none agree. Also the point about many people having no idea of what exists much beyond the village touches on the medieval mind too. Yet, all through the Middle ages, on the great pilgrimages, thousands who couldnt read or write or speak anything more than their local dialect managed to make it from say, Scotland to Santiago in NW Spain. It seems they followed natural features like river valleys, and asked directions (somehow) to the next church. Everyone knew they were pilgrims (and a bawdy, randy lot they were) so the peasant could give them an idea of how to get to the next church.
I think I might try this one day when I have open ended time to spare. I mean the mapless journey. Of course I have some idea in my memory of, say, a map of Europe, which I cant erase......still, it would be interesting to find out.....
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On the other hand....
Hybrid Mode
