Maps
are possibly one of the most useful and essential
pieces of equipment that you will carry with you.
Do not expect to rely on signposts which are often
non-existant and where they do exist, may be in a
script that you cannot decipher!
It is important to obtain the
majority of your maps prior to leaving your home
country. Not only does this assist in your route
planning but the quality of maps that you can buy
en-route can be very poor (and the maps are often
worse than useless). For example, we met an Indian
who gave up in despair with local maps and imported
a Lonely Planet India road atlas from the Netherlands!
In some countries, such as Pakistan and Iran, it
can be impossible to find local maps. For some reason,
Pakistanis can’t grasp the concept of using maps.
Even military men are unable to point to where you
are on a map!
The only exception to this general
point of obtianing maps prior to departure, is with
regard to town and city plans – it is usually possible
to obtain free maps for each town from the local
tourist board. These are usually only carried by
the local tourist offices and as such, the national
tourist office is unlikely to be of much help. We
took potluck and relied on the poor quality maps
in our guidebooks to take us to the local tourist
information offices to pickup a better town plan.
When you are obtaining maps for
countries that use a different alphabet (eg Islamic/Arabic
script, cyrillic, sanskrit or chinese) it may be
worth getting at least one map that has place names
written in the local script. This will make matching
the scribbles on road signs with places on the map
a great deal easier! Otherwise, you end up stopping
at every junction and asking the way. This usually
involves a great deal of gesturing and repeating
the place name in 100 different pronounciations
until someone realises which place you want to go
to!
So, below is a list of tourist maps based on different
travel needs while you plan to visit India:
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