Globetrotters January Travel Writing Prompt

You Can Get There From Here

Distance signposts are way more fun than Googlemaps

(This article is based on a writing prompt in Globetrotters)

We’re all just waiting for some kind of sign, aren’t we? Speaking of which, I do love a good mileage / kilometre marker on a highway. They put me immediately in a time and a place and they let me know that I am on the right track and with a bit of patience, I will get there.

Wherever there is.

They represent as good a place as any to stop and stretch the legs for a minute. And when I’ve stopped and taken photos of them, it’s often in a remote or obscure place on the side of the road, and likely somewhere that I will never be in again. They seem to say, “we know you won’t be here for long, but stop for a second and contemplate how far you’ve come and how far there is yet to go”.

I haven’t been to Australia yet, but when I go, I plan for it to involve a circumnavigation of the place. Part of the reason for this is because of the truly large distances that I’ve seen indicated on such markers and the sheer amount of kilometres between isolated places. I know I’m not the only one who has spent hours looking at Google Images of these indicators.

Am I?

I’d show you some examples, but I can’t because I don’t have my own images of them. Yet.

Two of the reasons that I look forward to the monthly travel writing prompt have to do with photos in general. Globetrotters requires the use of one’s own photos with a submission, and as a result, those that writers include from their own travels are often spectacular and inspiring. This then sends me scrolling through my own camera roll to see if I might have something worthy that would both jog my memory of a moment and send me off into a few hours of writing.

“Do this, don’t do that”, is a part of a song lyric that will automatically come to mind for many people. Rules, yes. But a sign can also tell a lot about a culture in terms of what is necessary to be said, but also what is valued in how it is said.

This month’s prompt is about signs that one might encounter on the road. There are many ways that this could go: any kind of signs, and it turns out that I’ve got a lot of photos of them.

But back to the signs that mark distance on a road trip. As I’ve mentioned in the subtitle, Googlemaps has its purpose but it’s far too precise as to be any fun. It takes the randomness of discovery out of travel to a certain extent.

Yes, sometimes I do want to know exactly. But other times I just want things to unfold as they will anyway, regardless of any planning and timing that I’ve put into it. For all the forward leaps in technology, a road trip is still a road trip. You still have to drive it and you can only go so fast in an hour and you can only cover so many miles in a day.

On a driving trip in this part of Africa, it’s important that you carry with you various ways of understanding where you are. A Lonely Planet guidebook can help. So can an analog, old school folding map. Some vehicles are equipped with a feature called AfriTracks, but this requires a certain amount of wifi to be useful. The same goes for Googlemaps on your phone.

When you put them all together, you should be able to have some idea of where you are and how to get where you are going. But then again, what is a comfortable tarmacked highway can turn into a sandy track without too much trying. Do whatever you want, but you will get hopelessly lost out there at some point. Don’t worry, too much anyway, it’s just part of it.

More on that misadventure and a few others can be found here.

Sri Lanka is a much smaller place than Botswana. Scooting around on my own on a rented whip on the south coast of the island country was an endeavour of exploration without too much worry about where exactly I was going.

At the time, the country was attempting to recover from a combination of natural disasters, terrorist bombing and financial meltdown that is still unresolved. As a result, I was there — in the summer of 2019 — at a time when not many other travellers were there discovering the place. I had the roads to myself in many instances.

The 140 or so kilometres between Hikkaduwa and Tangalle on the southeastern coast, with Galle in the middle as a base, offered countless small towns, roadside coconut stalls and plenty of opportunities for right turns to unpeopled beaches on the Indian Ocean.

And the traffic infrastructure outside Colombo, the capital, was great. Roadside distance markers never left any doubt that I’d get somewhere eventually if I just kept riding.

My home province of British Columbia, in western Canada is far more vast than either of these places. And once outside the largest city of Vancouver, it’s mostly small towns that one encounters. The southernmost 20% is relatively well connected from east to west and north to south. But the further north you go, the more sparsely populated things get. The rest of the country is mostly the same.

This signpost represents a road that I’ve still never traveled on, in the high country north of Whistler, which is itself high in the mountains, north of Vancouver. I’m still fascinated by what I’ll find in the small hamlets and who still lives there and why, 150 plus years after the end of whatever Gold Rush started their existence in the first place.

In the end, if you are traveling overland somewhere, anywhere in the world, it’s great to know where you are going. But it’s also ok not to, or to only have a vague idea. You might go hours without any government-provided indication that you are still going the right way. But every now and again, you’ll come over a rise in the road and there will be the sign that reminds you that you are still on the right track.

And everything is going to be alright.

Here are few more intrepid travelers who have written about the signs that guided them along their way around the world:

Jillian Amatt - Artistic Voyages sees signs as a source of comfort around the world (even if they are in foreign languages)

Adrienne Beaumont finds her way in Romania by following the signs: