Adventure Travel Guide - Don't Get Lost
By Anonymous
The best advice of an adventure travel guide is don't get lost.
If you have read Jock of the Bushveld, you will remember how a group of campers watched one of their members walk round the camp in circles, firing his gun into the treetops without seeming to take aim. Finally they realized that he was lost, and called out to him. It took him a long time to recover from his panic enough to become embarrassed about getting lost.
Unless you patronize luxury adventure travel tours you are responsible for not getting lost. One man died in the Australian outback because he left his car to walk up a slight rise without being prepared. He wandered in circles until he died. Aborigines can recognize each bush and give other aborigines directions accordingly. We can't. The motorist's mistake was not to notice the direction of the sun as he walked away from his car.
You can get a topographic map or maps, but if every direction is level, or every direction is riddled with ravines they won't be very helpful.
Compass: One morning I left my campsite near Kalgoorlie, heading North with my metal detector. After half an hour I decided to go back for breakfast. I took my direction from the compass without thinking about it and started heading South. Fortunately I woke up enough after a couple of minutes to realize that my shadow shouldn't be pointing South at breakfast time. I realized that the iron in the rocks made my compass useless.
A google map will help you when you are planning your trip, and Google Earth will help you to make up your souvenir scrapbook. Google earth can show you that you were planning to walk 20 miles through a swamp, that was only shown on your map by a few little marks like bird tracks.
I suggest buying a hand-held GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) device. You should never get lost with one of these, as long as you keep spare batteries. It is your luxury answer to navigation. I believe that Murphy was an optimist, so my hiking gear would also carry a compass and I would keep my eyes on the direction of the sun, just in case the GPS stopped working properly.
People have been surmounting the language barrier for thousands of years. Now you can buy a hand-held translator that will speak the translations of the phrases that you type in. Don't use it where people haven't heard of computers or they might sacrifice you to the nearest volcano.
But if most people hear a bad translation from a computer they will laugh, because they know that computers make mistakes in translation. That is better than spending ten years learning Spanish and insulting the Pope (Papa) by calling him a potato (papa) simply because you didn't know the correct word to use to go with the noun. My father, with years of experience, spoke of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a chicken.
If you are planning Spain walking holidays a computer translation will work. If you want to go hiking the Inca trail you have to realize that the official language (Spanish) may not be the native language. They will probably treat your attempts at Spanish with amused indulgence, because they aren't very good at it themselves. You might even be able to hire a human adventure travel guide that would be able to talk to the locals.
Most of what he says will probably be insulting you, because country people think that tourists are crazy foreigners, but you won't care, because you can't understand what is being said.
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