Next message: Peter Fogg: "Re: Navigation instruments from Paris, Maskelyne"
Quoting Marc Bernstein
>TOP100 ... show every village and track
I'd like to believe this. One of the things I enjoy in France is the relaxed attitude about private lands that seems
common (as compared to the sometimes obsessive anglophone attitude). Often fields are not fenced, there is no
way to tell whether a track is private or, for example, an access track into and across a forest area. The smaller
roads connecting rural properties, presumably part of the public network, are also often without names. Which
brings us full circle to the potential usefulness of the GPS.
Cartographers, like nature, abhor a vacuum. In vast areas of Australia they struggle, sometimes, to find anything
to decorate the blank surface with. I'm often amused at the tiny places that show up as though they were a major
town on different maps. Sometimes there is just one building, these days described as a roadhouse, that is the
only source for all that civilization has to offer over an extended area. Petrol, food, post ofice, banking,
bureaucracy in all its forms - everything from mining permits to voting - and all sorts of objects on sale to be
found nowhere else, like canvas water bags to keep drinking water cool via evaporation from the wet surface - a
wonderful invention, hung on the exterior of the vehicle - or camel.
Once I was looking for friends who were camped along the Paroo overflow, western NSW. The nearest town was
a opal mining place, full of wild and eccentric individuals who tended to stay underground every second Thursday
when the police visited. Most of the population lives underground, its cooler. Even the motel offers underground
accomodation. I arrived late and slept in the car. From before dawn car lights were heading to a place out of
town. At first light I folowed them. The destination was a freezer trailer, chugging away in the middle of a vast
empty plain. The vehicles congregating there looked like something out of Mad Max, with most of the bodies
removed as superfluous - who needs doors or roof or bonnet over the motor? - and a metal frame surounding
the whole from which hung the bodies of the biggest kangaroos I've seen. They had been shot that night and
were to be loaded into the freezer trailer, to be hauled away later. So if you enjoy exotic meat that may be
where your kangaroo came from. I asked them if they had seen my friends, someone had. Out there when two
vehicles pass the minimum of polite behaviour is to stop for at least a ten minute chat, drivers window to driver's
window. The road is blocked but that seldom matters. So spreads the local news. Anyway my friends were
travelling with a camel drawn wagon, distinctive enough. The two pulling the wagon were mother and daughter,
and the grandaughter followed behind, as spare. So directions were given:
"you go 'bout 30 mile 'til the water tank, then left 'bout 40 mile to the grid" (cattle grid of metal poles set into the
road, keeps catttle and sheep from crossing but not vehicles) and so on. Its only been about a quarter century
since we've converted to kilometres. No matter; the directions were clear, simple to follow and accurate. I
arrived for a late breakfast of fresh yabbies (like small freshwater lobster).
