Weekly Travel Tip 6
Get paper maps.
Map apps can fail in ways that paper never will. Here’s some of the reasons you should take a map on your trip.
My map of the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego was basic but better than nothing. There’s no cell service out there.
GPS and mapping apps on smart phones have revolutionized the way we road trip and the way we plan road trips.
Yet, some of my best road trips have through areas without cell service, or where the old dirt logging roads don’t appear on Google Maps. For those trips, I need to have paper maps.
Sometimes, it works out anyway. I had only the most basic map of Tierra del Fuego from the tourist office in Punta Arenas, Chile last year. It didn’t look remotely adequate, yet the tourist office employee had assured me that there was only one road. There was no cell service, but I couldn’t get lost because there were no wrong turns to take. Side roads went to farmhouses and were clearly posted with the farm’s or the family’s name.
No matter how well apps and GPS work in cities and in populated areas, they’re never as reliable when you get out in the mountains. Even if you have cell service, technology can fail in so many other ways. AAA used to print road maps of every state and maybe they still do. My road trips in the US always started with gathering the folded AAA maps for every state I’d drive through.
I found this map in a museum in Bogotá, Colombia. It looks like South America is Peru and North America is attached to India. Antarctica appears to be the island of Tierra del Fuego, which certainly feels like it’s almost Antarctica.
Then there’s the fact that I love maps.
Before I started living in other countries, I collected old maps. I loved the maps from the 1700s with continents shaped oddly and sea monsters lurking in the Pacific. I still love maps, but I have moved so many times in the past twenty years that it’s hard to hang on to posters or anything framed. I’ve lived on five continents and even in just four years in Cusco I’m on my sixth apartment. Moving so many times has severely limited how much stuff I can accumulate.
If you’re able to get paper maps of where you’re going, enjoy them. Draw on them and keep them as the best kind of souvenir: the record of where you gathered all the other souvenirs.
Recent blog
Manu BioLodge in the Peruvian Amazon
I spent the most incredible six days at the Manu BioLodge. Click on the link above to see birds from the Peruvian Amazon and learn about the scientific studies being conducted at the Manu BioStation. The lodge I stayed at is a non-profit and staying there supports the conservation work and scientific research done at the adjoining research station.
For the birders out there, Manu BioLodge is the new name of the famed Villa Carmen. So far, 659 bird species have been identified on the research station’s 7,600 acres. This is the Amazon, so if you want to try finding a species that hasn’t been described by science yet, Manu is a good place to start. I didn’t get to a hundred species, but that’s probably because I spent more time interviewing scientists about their research than birding. I also made the rookie mistake of leaving the binoculars in Cusco.
Recent article
A review of Monasterio, A Belmond Hotel
This is such a beautiful hotel! I’ve been having a lot of fun reviewing hotels for Luxury Latin America. I didn’t get to stay at the Monasterio, but I got a tour and definitely enjoyed seeing the place. This is the second of four Cusco hotels I’ve reviewed for Luxury Latin America.
