Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

From the Guyana Project

I always prefer to travel with maps; it unnerves me not understanding the geography of a place, not knowing which way is north. In any strange place, city or island or jungle, I try to keep a map with me, so I can check the landscape I see before me against the drawing on the paper, relate the time it takes to move from one point to another to the lines and symbols on the chart. I never feel I know a place until I can somehow impose upon the fabric of my sensations and memories an image as seen from some impossible location high above the earth. But I had not been able to find a good map in Georgetown, and now I was travelling blind, as it were; like a man groping round a room, I felt I was drawing on my other senses to fill in the blank spaces in my idea of the land I was crossing.