Off the Beaten Map

Some people thrive on organisational tasks; it is their lifeblood, the chores that feed their soul. I am not one of those people. While I do like to plan ahead, I do not glean any particular joy from it. Even when it comes to making travel plans, and even when I am venturing off to an exotic location to eat fantastic food and to review luxury boutique hotels, I just don’t find it inspiring work to stare at a map and plan how I am going to get from A to B. It’s the doing that I like, not the planning.

And so I am faced with a pile of paperwork, tattered maps, restaurants to reserve, hotels to contact, bureaucratic forms to complete, Visas to secure, planes to book, border guards to bribe, and I am only going to Wales.

Just kidding, I am going to Africa. Don’t ask me why, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s sunny in Africa. I like sunshine. If only one could simply jump on a plane and everything else was prepared for you. I guess that’s what it’s like having a PA to plan every move of your life. You don’t even have to worry about which hotel you’re staying at; you’ll already know that it will be the most suitable to your tastes. And if it isn’t, you have someone other than yourself to blame.

Speaking of maps and planning how and where to travel, the advent of Google Maps and especially their satellite imagery has, one might suppose, made the art of geographic manoeuvring (a flowery phrase for ‘travelling’, if you want to be pretentious) a lot easier. But I have found this to be anything but the case.

A few months ago I ventured out to Tuscany. Not the most exotic of locations but being an Arbuturian I naturally veered off the beaten track to find those quiet gems that tourists, and even some locals, don’t know about. So I turned to Google to assist me. I had it all sorted, pages of A4 satellite imagery and scale maps printed out and ready to navigate with. Yet I still managed to get lost along an overgrown dirt track somewhere in the mountains that was last traversed by a human in 1645, and certainly not in a Fiat Punto that demonstrated its own disapproval of our predicament by trying to put a wheel over the perilous cliff edge at every chance it got. So I cursed Google for their inaccurate cartographic skills as I burnt the maps over the campfire and wondered if I would be devoured in the night by a rabid wild boar.

What’s more worrying is that I am relying on Google to help me navigate in a rather more dangerous country this time. Driving around Africa is something of a lottery. Even when you have a good map it’s still not easy to find your way around. Once I drove five miles in the wrong direction and I only discovered that I had made a wrong turn when the tarmac road suddenly ended and I found myself bumping along a dirt track and heading into the middle of nowhere (I was already in the middle of nowhere, but this was even more nowhere).

You may be thinking that my problem is my own navigational skills and not the maps I’m using, like a cowboy builder blaming his equipment. But I’m actually quite a good navigator. Strangely, though, I am better at navigating in the wild – through the bush or woodland, for example – than I am on roads and in cities. I’m not sure why this is. So when I visit cities and Mrs Jones is accompanying me, I let her do the navigating. And when we’re venturing into the wild, she lets me take the lead – because I’ll be the first one to get eaten when I stumble over a sleeping lion.

That’s why Lawrence is our travel correspondent and not me. Larry is a born explorer. He can navigate on all kinds of terra firma, and frequently does (though he had trouble finding The Greenhouse restaurant). He would be perfectly happy to be air-dropped into the Libyan desert like Bear Grylls, with nothing but a water bottle and his trusty moleskin diary. Whereas I’d be wondering where the restaurants are, and do you stock Hennessy XO, bartender?
Bartender?
Anyone?

Jonesy will be writing a full report on his upcoming trip to Africa. If he makes it back alive.