About a week after embarking on my winter journey through Asia, I wrote the following passage in my journal: “More than steak or bourbon I am dying for a decent map to Sumatra.”
Indeed, as much as I have celebrated the joys of motorcycle travel here in Sumatra, the journey has been complicated by the fact that road-signs can be hard to decipher, and paper maps to the area are sorely lacking in detail.
I have always been fond of paper maps, to the point of being sentimental (my earliest travel-dreaming was, after all done in front of paper maps and atlases). In function they have largely been replaced by smartphone navigation apps – but as I prefer to travel unplugged (only using my phone with Wi-Fi) I don’t use them.
I took this selfie the day I left Lake Maninjau. The plan was to ride a ring road around the lake (a task that takes a couple hours), then take the 44-turn road up to the plateau and find my way to Puncak Lawang, a scenic peak overlooking the lake.
Unfortunately I got turned around, and rode halfway to the Indian Ocean before realizing that I was no longer following the lake road. A part of me wanted to keep going – to just continue on to the coast and see what the ocean-road had to offer.
This presented an interesting conundrum: Should I turn back to the beauty and certainty of the lake road, or strike out into the unknown? There’s a reason why travelers tend to end up at the same awesome spots (such as the Lake Maninjau road), but isn’t travel also about the serendipity of the unexpected?
Friends, I am here to confess that I cheated on my paper maps with an app called maps.me. I’ve had it on my phone for ages, but at that moment – not sure which way to go – I recalled that maps.me works offline.
In a moment, I was thus able to see where I was, and what awaited me in either direction. Sensing that the coastal road would be a bottleneck, I headed inland, circled the lake, and rode to the overlook, which offered a gorgeous view of the caldera below.
So there you have it: An inadvertent plug for the in-the-field usefulness of maps.me.
(Now, I guess, I can go back to jonesing for steak and bourbon.)
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
Share This
