Maps

You know where you're going, right? Well, if you're anything like the rest of us you're doomed to take a wrong turn at some point in which case you'll need to figure out where you are on a map.

In the old days people set off with a map and a compass and wouldn't you just believe it, they're even better today because the maps are better. Paper maps are surprisingly hard to destroy and are fantastic for overall and ad hoc planning.

Wherever you are headed in this world, have a paper map of it stuffed in your bag. If you can, have a compass visible to help you orient yourself.

One thing that is surprising for those of us used to to the detail offered by the Ordnance Survey, for example, is the absence of detail or varying quantity and quality of detail for other countries.

It's not especially clear why this should be though you can imagine a number of reasons:

the country simply hasn't been mapped
it has been mapped by the military (and you're not them)
there is no independent leisure travel market (ie. no road-going tourists)
access to the country to create road atlases is limited

There's some interesting questions regarding quality too. The Makram Coastal Highway on the Indian Ocean coast of Pakistan can been seen on Google Maps and the odd picture online are a perfectly good single-carriageway tarmac road. However, maps of the area are unsure whether to mark it as a highway or a track.

They might then disagree on the extent of the tracks crossing the desert north up to the RCD highway between Iran and Quetta.

There's also a problem of scale. There are no (were no) road atlases of Australia but rather a series of small scale maps of various interesting bits of the coastline. That's because the interesting bits require a small enough scale that it is impossible to replicate for such a large continent. The only roads trough the middle of the continent are as well represented by a single fanfold of the entire continent as they would be by a box full of small scale representations.

A smaller scale is better but a comparison of maps of India at 1:1.5M and 1:1.3M showed that there was merely more physical space used on the 1:1.3M map and no more useful detail.

What I buy

The maps I buy have as much detail as it reasonably feasible but there are two things I really do need:

the distances between places marked on the map
places of interest highlighted

You'd be surprised how many maps do not have one or other of those two. The first is essential if you're to do any sort of planning whether overall (if you're estimating 300km per day you can see where that might lead you) or ad hoc where you discover that you've made a wrong turn or the going is slower than expected and you need to revise your goal.

vs. GPS

It goes without saying that not only will a GPS give you much more detail than a paper map (potentially down to street level for an entire country) but can also tell you where you are within a couple of meters but you can also upload and follow a trail someone else made where there are no roads to be followed.

However, a GPS is a box of electronics and can fail. It may not have a map of your destination at all or a map that is essentially worthless [1].

Above all else, it is virtually impossible to plan any sort of route on a GPS, the screens are too small and the only way to determine distances is to actually plot a route.

[1]

I remember traveling into Aleppo in northern Syria where the four major arteries simply stopped a kilometer from the city centre. I guessed then that it was now up to me. A little later in the trip, traveling down the main route south the GPS was reporting I was consistently 1km into the desert from where it thought the road was.

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