by Matt Gross
But I can’t say that, because I don’t remember that feeling. What I do know is that in the thirty years since that evening in Copenhagen, I haven’t come close to being lost—not once. It’s difficult to say for certain how I developed my sense of direction. (Although wouldn’t it be great if I could point to the trauma of getting lost at Tivoli Gardens as its catalyst? Alas.) In fifth or sixth grade, I know, we were taught to read maps: how to examine the legend, understand scaling, measure distances between two points. Or maybe it was even earlier—all those maps in the J.R.R. Tolkien books fascinated me more than the garbled plots ever did.
And that Tolkien obsession grew and mutated. One of the first things I bought in Vietnam in 1996 was a map of Ho Chi Minh City, its main roads well-marked, its districts clearly numbered and set in different colors. The map’s informational quality far exceeded that of its paper, and I had to replace it two or three times; and each replacement evolved, with new landmarks added and old streets removed—it made me feel I was truly witnessing the city’s growth. A year later, in Baltimore, I bought a 1967 Times of London atlas, whose rich detail and antiquated political lines were (and remain) fodder for an afternoon’s daydreams. Yahoo’s, MapQuest’s, and Google’s products began to consume my hours. In Brooklyn, I hung a 13 x 9-foot map of the world in our second bedroom, and a three-foot laminated map (unfortunately lacking today’s newest country, South Sudan) now faces me when I look up from my laptop in my office. On a bookshelf at home rests a French globe from, I believe, the immediate postwar period: vast blotches of colonialism, a not-yet-divided Germany.
You look at these maps long enough and you start to fall into them, to connect the infinite dots of the world. That huge wall map shows shipping routes—Montevideo to Miami, Cape Town to Port Saïd—and another Mediterranean map, purchased in preparation for that first round-the-world Frugal Traveler trip, picks out oases in the North African deserts. In the center of Brazil, I see the Mato Grosso Plateau and wonder when I’ll meet my “big jungle” namesake. Norwegian islands in the South Atlantic, Attu Island in westernmost Alaska, and cities I’d never noticed before—Jask, Mbuji-Mayi, Caniapiscau, Piolesti—and now long to visit. And when I do, I’ll know where I am.
But then I can read maps. Many people cannot—some not effectively, others not at all. Often, this depends on which country you’re from; in some, maps make no sense.
“I ran across this a lot in Phnom Penh in the mid-late nineties,” my friend Rich Garella, who worked at the Cambodia Daily, wrote me on Facebook. “Most notably, one time at the newspaper office we were putting up a huge topographical map of Cambodia. It came in about a hundred sheets, so I asked a member of the admin staff to help piece it together. She had no idea what it was or what I was asking her to do. I had to get her to imagine she was flying high like a bird and looking down, and then showed her home village to her. She was absolutely awestruck.”
I got a taste of this, too, when I was reporting one of those first stories for the New York Times, about the sleepy Cambodian river town of Kampot. In the center of Kampot, I’d noticed a new-looking hotel, the Borey Bokor, and went in to find out more information. At the front desk was a young woman, friendly and enthusiastic, wearing gold jewelry and stylish makeup. I asked her about the hotel, the rooms, the rates, then, finally, its address. She didn’t know.
“Okay,” I said, “what’s the name of this road?” Outside was a medium-sized street leading to Kampot’s central traffic circle.
“I don’t know,” she said in English, then her eyes opened wide as she had a brainstorm. “I don’t know,” she repeated with excitement, “because I don’t care!”
What she meant, more specifically, was that the street names just didn’t matter to her, or to anyone in Kampot. The Borey Bokor was near the traffic circle, and that was as much direction as was necessary.
It would be easy to dismiss this attitude as the natural state of much of the developing world, but surely there are complicating factors—like Cambodia’s depressing twentieth-century history of colonialism, war, autogenocide, and invasion. With a semiliterate population inhabiting a land where names change with each new ruler, why fixate?
But I’ve found similar phenomena all over the world, sometimes with interesting variations. In Japan, for instance, mailing addresses are hyperprecise, but don’t function in the same linearly progressive way as in the West; rather, they identify buildings not on specific streets but on specific city blocks, making them useful primarily for the post office, the police, and the government. So while streets do have names, those names won’t necessarily tell you where a particular business or home happens to be.
Which is not to say no one knows where anything is. In many of the places where maps have no common use—including the United States, which is likely as map-illiterate as anywhere else—people navigate by methods linked to their personal point of view and landmarks. This is how many of us function by default (“cue-response strategy” is the technical term) and why turn-by-turn GPS mapping is so successful. Rather than by giving you an overview of a route, and requiring you to understand, as a whole, the relationships and connections between multiple points, the devices adopt our outlook, telling us at each moment what to do and where to go.
This human’s-eye view approach has deep roots not just in our psyches but in mapmaking as well. In the archives of the Austrian National Library is a remarkable document, the Tabula Peutingeriana. A thirteenth-century copy of a fourth- or early-fifth-century map, the Tabula lays out the incredible network of roads that crisscrossed the Roman Empire. Yet instead of taking the now-default bird’s-eye view, the Tabula unfolds as a scroll—about one foot by twenty-two feet—with Rome at its center, and the roads leading outward, roughly east and west, from the Iberian peninsula to Antioch, Mesopotamia, and even the Ganges. The roads, inked in red, with interstitial hooks to denote a day’s journey, progress landmark by landmark: buildings of varying size, rivers, mountains, lakes, and well-identified cities and towns. It’s exactly what a traveling courier, soldier, or diplomat would have encountered along the way—an imperial Roman version of Google Street View.
The Tabula is transfixing—so much that I spent thirty minutes writing that last paragraph because I kept getting absorbed in scouring the digital version of the map for recognizable place names, like Palestina and Bactrianos. And as amazed as I am to behold it, my wonder must be nothing compared to that of an actual fifth-century Roman, who could have gazed the length of the scroll and imagined it not only contained the entire world but rendered it navigable, accessible—human scale.
Before the Tabula, maps of the world—at least those we know of—were different. Some were symbolic, such as a Babylonian carving of seven islands surrounded by a “bitter river.” Others from antiquity, which we mostly know through later reconstructions, took a more recognizably geographic approach to rendering the continents and bodies of water—Italy’s boot, for example, is obvious in many of these—although the limits of human knowledge are evident, too.
What unites these earlier maps—and what makes the Tabula so revolutionary—is that they are attempts to depict the world as it is. Cities and landmarks may appear upon them, but the world’s natural, objective shape is of paramount importance. Not so with the Tabula, which maps instead the manmade world. Roads are now the organizing principle, the cities of humanity supplanting god-wrought geography as the fundamental unit of existence. The Tabula is a monument to mankind’s dominion over the earth, and a map of the possibilities of existence. “What is the world?” was the old question. With the Tabula, we now ask, “Where am I in the world? And where else can I be?”
These are questions that, with a map before me, I can ponder for hours. But take away the map, and I have answers instantaneously. I know where I am, and I know how I got there. I might even be able to give you relatively accurate lat-longs.
What I don’t know is how it feels to be lost—how you, one of the millions or maybe billions
of human beings with neither a sense of direction nor map-reading skills, feel when you look around and realize that nothing gels, no landmark strikes your memory, no path leads back to the familiar. This matters to me because it is so widespread, and as a traveler who wants to understand why and how we travel, I don’t want to assume you are filled with panic or fear. Perhaps you’re like my friend Don George, a perpetually sunny writer and editor who’s been roaming the world for decades, yet had to ask me for directions when he gave me a ride through San Francisco—even though he lives right across the bay. For Don, getting lost is something he has to live with, but he thinks of it (he told me in an interview in 2010) as “the gift of being directionally challenged.”
“My instinct is pretty much always to go the way that is opposite of the way I should be going,” he said. “And this has served me extremely well professionally. When you get lost—when you, essentially, always go the opposite direction from the way you should—all kinds of marvelous and illuminating adventures ensue.”
In Cairo, he went on, he’d started out one day heading (he thought) for a neighborhood full of “touristy attractions,” but instead wound up going deeper and deeper into a maze of ever-narrower alleys. “I saw all kinds of everyday, working-class shops and houses I probably wouldn’t have seen on my planned excursion,” he said. “Eventually I ended up walking down an alley lined with down-and-out people looking covetously at my watch. The alley got so narrow that I was literally stepping over their legs in some places. Clearly I was lost and I thought that I was headed for big trouble. But then, just when I was beginning to get desperate, a young boy materialized and wordlessly took my hand. He turned me around and walked me out of the maze and into ever broader and broader streets, until he deposited me in a main square. I looked around and realized that I recognized where I was. Then I turned back to thank him. In that instant, he had melted away into the crowd.”
What struck me about Don’s Cairo story was not its climax and resolution but its beginning. I, too, have had more than my share of magical help-from-nowhere moments—in Slovakia, in Georgia, in British Columbia—but to get into such predicaments, I’ve had to act deliberately. I’ve had to understand maps or the layout of cities, and consciously turn away from the touristy areas, moving step by knowing step into the neighborhoods I hope will contain those untarnished working-class shops and houses (or whatever). This is maybe not the greatest thing to complain about, but when I hear the stories of people like Don, I feel crude and calculating: I know I can get myself to the place where the kid will lead me to safety, where the old man will pour me a drink and tell me tales in the Italian he learned as a boy, where the babushka on the shared minibus in rural Kyrgyzstan will hand me one of the loaves of bread she baked for her niece. I’m not sure I believed Don’s way was better or purer than my approach, but I understood, too, that knowing how to manipulate these situations told me nothing about myself. My mastery of maps and directions preserved my illusion of control, and kept me from reaching that point of utter helplessness, that terrifying point when I would—well, what would I do?
The first thing you do when you arrive in a strange city and want to get lost is put your bags away. Getting lost involves—requires—intense wandering, and a suitcase or heavy backpack is only going to slow you down and make you long for a hotel, a shower, and a change of clothes. If you’re lucky, you’re already at the bus or train station, and the left-luggage office is perfectly equipped to care for your things as long as you like. And then, swearing never to glance at the map on your phone, you just set out.
Ideally, you’ll have taken some getting-lost precautions. You won’t have read a guidebook, or looked at a map, or been there before, so you won’t know how the city is organized at all. (Except, of course, that you can smell the salt air blowing up from the Straits of Gibraltar and through the Tangier medina, and from anywhere in the nighttime desert you can spot the glowing palaces of the Vegas Strip.) All you know of the place is its rough history and its reputation, gleaned from half-remembered high school classes, movies that favor stereotypes over subtlety, news reports from questionable sources, and friends’ post-vacation praise and complaints.
Maybe you know even more than that. Maybe you’re there because you understand that this place is thematically apt for getting lost. Like Tangier, a gray zone that lies at the northern tip of Morocco, a jumping-off point for both Arab invasions and European colonialism, and thus not really one or the other, instead a jumble of French and Spanish and Arab (and American) people and languages and ways of living. Or like Paris, whose nineteenth-century flâneurs redefined the aimless wander as a sophisticated modern pursuit. Or like Chongqing, the city of thirty-three million whose steroidal skyscrapers spread, uncontrolled, across a swathe of mountainous, river-cut southwestern China twice as big as Switzerland.
Venice? Not a bad idea, but maybe you’ve been there already, and realized how terribly small it is. In Venice, you can lose your way for five minutes, ten minutes, but then you’ll intersect a horde of tourists, or stumble upon a vaporetto stop, and you’ll instantly reorient. Ditto hundreds of other locales, both familiar and foreign, whose chaotic layouts seem to promise you’ll lose yourself, but whose limits—size, variety, complexity—are all too obvious.
You consider the wilderness. The forests of Montana, the sands of the Sahara, the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans. Yes, getting lost might be easy. But you want, eventually, to get un-lost, too, and emerge at the end of a week or two alive and intact. To want to get lost is not a death wish. Rather, it’s the desire to block out the noise of expectation and structure, to experience surprise and the challenge of disorientation, to travel as if you’d never traveled before.
To pretend I’d never traveled before was impossible, of course, but it’s what I attempted to do starting in the summer of 2010, after my stint as the Frugal Traveler came to an end. A new editor, Danielle, had recently taken over the Travel section, and over steak-frites and red wine in a diner near the Times building, she asked me to pitch her a new series of travel stories, one that was ambitious in scope but had no service element. These adventures did not need to be useful to or replicable by readers, she said; they only had to be great stories and well written.
So I began to talk to Danielle about what had happened at Tivoli Gardens and how, in the years since, it had never happened again. What I wanted to do, I told her, was to get lost, and to do so I needed to go to extremes: I would travel without a guidebook or a map, without contacts or a plan, without even booking a hotel to crash at upon arrival.
To her credit, Danielle saw this idea as more than one weird traveler’s crazy mission. Getting lost—or, as the series would be called, “Getting Lost”—was a way of casting off the shackles of checklist tourism, GPS-based driving directions, and Internet advice forums, all in the hope of finding something more engaging, more true, more real. Which is, I think, what I was hoping for, too, even if I couldn’t yet articulate it. All I wanted to do was go somewhere, blindly, and with these artificial constraints governing my behavior, I would see what happened.
What happened was this: Every day for a week in July, I stormed through the Tangier medina, a maze of ochre alleyways, thick wooden doors, and shadows that provided fleeting protection from the Mediterranean sun. Trying urgently not to consider my route, I turned left and right and left again, marching up stairways and under archways and ignoring children who bobbled soccer balls and warned me certain pathways were fermés—closed. (They were always right, those routes always dead-ended, and I always had to backtrack.) I watched women carrying bundles of pungent mint to market and old men shuffling in loose, hooded djellabas, like retired Jedi.
And as I maintained my forward momentum, I realized: this was not working. As labyrinthine as the medina was, it lay on a hill that sloped down toward the sea—which meant I was, almost unconsciously, orienting myself. Every step uphill took me inland, every step down led to the shore. And as my paths cros
sed each other and repeated, I could tell that, even if my brain had not yet processed the exact route from one end of the medina to the other, my legs were figuring it out. Traitors!
Not exactly helping things were all the guides (licensed and ad hoc, old men and young boys), who cooed at me in English, French, and Spanish, “What are you looking for? Where are you going? You want the Casbah? Hashish?” I didn’t want to ignore them—that seemed rude—but no answer, especially the truth, could satisfy them. Indeed, any answer only invited them closer. One, a tall, thin guy named Abdul whom I met outside the riad, or traditional house, where I’d decided to spend my first night, announced to me that he was not a guide, just a neighbor, that he’d grown up in the Casbah, the old walled citadel atop the medina, and that he wanted to accompany me as I walked around. He would, he promised, not ask me for money.
As clearly and eloquently as possible, I explained to him that I had come to Tangier for no other reason than to get lost, that getting lost was something one could only do alone, and that while his offer was very generous, I had no choice but to refuse.
In that case, he countered, he would let me go, but would follow well behind me—several meters at least—available to explain whatever might need explaining. A fair compromise, I thought, and so off I walked—with him right at my side, explaining absolutely everything: Behind this wooden door was Mick Jagger’s house; that minaret was the only octagonal one in Tangier; Kofi Annan once went to that café. I tried to argue, asked for space, turned on my heel, ducked around corners to hide when I thought he wasn’t looking, but to no avail. Fine. If I couldn’t lose him, I’d put my losing-myself plans on hold for the evening and take advantage of Abdul’s expertise. I asked if he knew a leather worker who could fix the ancient canvas shoulder bag I was carrying; indeed, he did, and we spent a very long hour in front of a tiny storefront in a skinny passageway, watching a one-handed man with horrific scars across half his face mend and rebuild the bag. It was a frustrating interlude, and when it was over I wanted desperately to get away from Abdul and be on my own.