February 3, 2022 Page 7
Travel from front page
to bend and form the Seven Seas into the
attractive, intricate, and hopefully navigable
blocks of his famous projection.
Even in modern times, with our preference
for efficiency over splendor, maps have
represented the best of our cultures. In the
explosion of tourism that followed Napoleon’s
exit at Waterloo, German and French maps
Vienna, Austria: Rest assured, you’re in safe hands with Atlas— Land’s End, Cornwall: Signpost to the edge of a flat world full of waterspouts, whales, and sea monsters.
tickling not advised.
radiated a colorful obsession with perfection
in engineering that continues to this day. The
British love of the small-scale life translated
into gorgeous walking maps, with footpaths
and field gates intersecting the elevation lines
of every hill and dale in the British Isles. In
the 20th century, the grand scope of American
generosity and salesmanship found its reflection
in the more than eight billion free road
maps handed out with a windshield scrub
at the filling stations of the road-and carobsessed
country.
Countless battles throughout history have
been won and lost based purely on the accuracy
of the invader’s geographical and
topographical information—their maps. We
also imagine that countless divorces have
been hurried along by missed right turns
and a driver’s explosion of frustration at the
navigator in the shotgun seat. Map-reading
has always been a very serious business.
Early in World War II, when Adolf Hitler
kept promising an invasion of the southern
English coast, he had all the maps he needed.
But the always ingenious British took down
or turned every directional post and street
sign from Kent to Cornwall. Fortunately, the
strategy was never tested, but for postwar
schoolboys, there was the delicious image
of sullen, confused Nazis careening all over
the countryside, while the plucky English
housewives, retirees—and schoolboys, of
course—picked them off one by one.
And yet…
We still recall the drudgery of constantly
switching back and forth between country,
state, and city maps, all of them in a ugly
wad of worn, ripped, and half-opened paper
on the back seat of the rental car—until the
sun set and rendered the entire mess useless.
Nowadays, we just press the plus and minus
icons on our backlit cell phones to zoom
in and out. We might have no idea where
we’ve just passed, but at least we arrive sane
and healthy. And in cities with a reputation
for besieging tourists, we no longer give
ourselves away by bickering and fumbling
a mountain of paper. No, we’re just on the
phone, same as any other busy, respectable
local. Or so we pretend.
The other problem with maps that seems to
have gone away is clutter. Cities and towns
make dense subjects, packed with endless
opportunities and obstacles—streets and
squares, palaces and monuments, restaurants
and hotels, public toilets, one-way lanes and
dead ends, shops by the thousand. There was
always an issue with how much information
you could include in a map without making
it unreadable—and usually the answer was
not nearly enough. These days, any map
program lets you focus on just the pubs
or just the Punjabi restaurants in just the
neighborhood you’re exploring. Maps, guide
books, magazine articles, and all have collapsed
into that tiny, impact-protected toy in
the palm of your hand.
Up to a point.
On the very first morning of our first trip
to Mumbai, we awoke for our usual 7AM
coffee stroll and left the hotel with Google
Maps and iPhone in hand. I’d always wanted
to visit the Sassoon Docks, one of the legendary
points in the constellation of the ancient
British East India Tea Company. One of the
walking routes on the cell phone would take
us along the picturesque Colaba Seawall, so
we naturally selected it. What we didn’t know
was that Google Maps, at least in Mumbai,
fails to differentiate between a causeway, a
quiet side street, and an alley through a slum.
We found the error of our way, when we
turned a corner to a sudden, very loud shriek
of surprise. The old lady arranging her sari
in her open tarpaulin home recovered and
returned our “Namaste” with an embarrassed
grin. Four beautiful children playing cricket
in the gutter stopped to let us pass, then
followed along, gleefully demanding “10
rupee!” (we later decided that the 10-rupee
thing was a game we could play with children
all over the city). A busy mother glanced up
from where she was castigating her baby
for defecating in the street and not over the
drain like a good boy. At another drain, an
old man was studiously clearing the previous
day’s deposits with a bamboo stick. By a
hydrant, a man in his underwear was soaping
himself up, while his friends waited with
buckets of cold water to rinse him off. No
one seemed to mind the invasion—except the
invaders, of course, who couldn’t get through
fast enough.
It’s possible that someday someone will
scratch at the annoying microchip in their
neck and look back nostalgically on the good,
old, romantic days of iPhones and Google
Maps. For now, we have to begrudgingly
respect the progress these tools represent
in addressing the bugaboos of traditional
navigation. We might not wax poetic over
their beauty and virtue, but… We haven’t
carried a working map in years.
Next up: Life and Death Valley.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
Glencoe, Scotland: Can you hear me now? Apparently not. Greenwich, England: Time has to start and end somewhere. If you’re British, it might as well be here.
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