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This week, I’m going to interrupt regular programming to talk about maps. I have nothing against the tried and tested Indian way of navigating – asking for directions. Stopping to ask a passerby doesn’t deal body blows to my ego and, more often than not, tapping the ‘local talent’ has yielded advantages like traffic tips and shortcuts. But start talking about a road trip and I run to nearest map. There’s something fascinating about that expanse of lines and dots and jiggles, a sense of promise that it exudes, that I find hard to resist. I use them every opportunity I get. From planning the journey using the most best maps available, to going on a jungle trek guided purely by a hand-drawn map on a torn sheet. I’ve used them all from local municipality maps to glossy ones with cute graphics available at foreign tourist destinations and the unreliable roadside ones you can buy for Rs 20 at Connaught Place.

When it comes to planning a road trip, the first thing I pick up is my trusted Eicher book of maps of India. It may not go into crazy detail, but it is the best and most accurate way of planning a journey. Its network of national and state highways and other major roads is quite accurately laid out, allowing you to pick and choose the destinations you want to go to, plan the best way to cover them all, while getting an accurate sense of the distances, etc.

But when it comes to the nitty-gritties, that is simply not quite enough. Where there is a bypass or there isn’t, it won’t always tell you. And it’s absolutely no help when you’re stuck in the middle of a very busy small town that sits plonk on the highway, and you need to decide whether the narrow road going to the left or the even narrower one packed with hawkers to your right is the highway. The only solution in that situation has always been to roll down the window and ask; risking the ire of the traffic behind you, furtively glancing at the two wheeler trying to sidle past your car and wondering if it’ll nick the side of your car.

This time, I resorted to technology and summoned up Google Maps to my aid. Running on GPRS, it was accurate enough to tell me where exactly I was in a town, and whether I had to turn left at this intersection or the next. It was simply fabulous not to have to stop by the side of the road every five minutes, asking four different people for directions and creating a minor traffic jam each time. While the application worked equally well in terms of planning the route, identifying our location and guiding us on both my dad’s iPhone and my Nokia E63, the touch phone had a definite advantage. Its interface was that much more intuitive and easier to use; zooming in and out and navigating to different areas on the map was much simpler. I even tried out the Nokia Maps application, and while that’s more rich in local detail, it’s rather hard to use – I still haven’t been able to figure out how to make it give me directions to travel from point a to point b.

However, do keep in mind, that Google map always plots your journey distance and route sticking to the highways. When it comes to bypasses, it’s fairly useless, as I discovered when I turned on to the still-under-construction bypass to Kathgodam town. Google Map didn’t show a bypass at all, and since there wasn’t a soul in sight, we followed the road and wound up in the middle of a very busy market running on very busy and narrow streets. Finding our way from there back to the main road and the highway was quite the adventure.

But that’s the thing about most maps I’ve used. They’re weak on the details that are actually useful to a road traveller. Often, what shows up as a big town on a map is nothing more than a truckers’ stop close to the border, and the nicest spots are missed out altogether. But that’s when you need to start modifying a map with a dark, sharpened pencil. Adding some stops and erasing others. Colouring in alternative, more scenic routes. Highlighting places along the way that serve the best paneer pakoda and freshlime soda. Till the point when your map becomes a living, breathing, evolving organism.

Of course, I’m really looking forward to the day I’ll have a GPS guided console in my car with a touchscreen in which I can point out my start and end point, and other places along the way I want to visit, letting it decide my route. It should let me configure in bypasses, and update its info to make notations on good foodstops and route changes that become available to all. That’d be pretty cool eh?

So tell me, what are your navigating secrets and what has been your experience with the new technologies? Oh, and Notes from a Travel Diary will be back next week.

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