Posts Tagged ‘geography’

So, after all the recent corn related excitement I’ve been playing around with something else that I get very excited about, maps. When I was travelling South in Patagonia, I often found myself curious about where I would be on an equivalent point in the Northern Hemisphere.

I don’t mean finding the opposite point on the earth’s surface, simply that if I am at 42ºS, what cities are on or around 42ºN?

I couldn’t find anything that did it on the internet, so I built it. After a quiet long weekend here in Buenos Aires, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the GringoStarr Switchit Latitude Flipper! Catchy name huh?

switchit - Turn Your World Upside Down

It’s fairly simple to use, just type in the name of the place you would like to search for and click the button. For places in the USA, you need to put the state in too, like “Denver, CO” for example.

If you type in somewhere that isn’t in the database, it gets recorded and every day or so I’ll look them up and add them in. Have a play, there are MAPS too, and if you have any comments, please let me know!

Having spent a very nice Christmas and New Year with the family, yesterday I arrived in Bogota. One of the first things you I like to do when arriving in a new city is try to figure out roughly where things are and how to get around, so when Laura gave me a Tourist Map of Bogota, I had a flick through to see what was what.  The back of the map contains lots of useful information including the following advice about Street Addresses:

Moving around Bogota is easy. The two mountains Monserrate and Guadalupe are the reference point. The carreras (KR) run parallel to the mountains North-South, and numbers increase from East to West. The calles (CL) are perpendicular to the mountains, and numbers increase from South-North. A transversal (TR) is similar to a carrera, and adiagonal (DG) is similar to a calle. The avendias are denominated (AK) when the correspond to a carrera, and (AC) when they a correspond to a calle. The avenidas also can be distinguished by a name, for example: Avenida Cuidad de Quito.

Got it?

Ok, so I’m a geography nerd. That’s not news to anyone. I’ve spent more time on buses in Brasil so far than actually in Brasil if you see what I mean and the only reading material I have is my Lonely Planet Brazil. So there I was flicking through the pages yesterday and discovered that there is an island in the mouth of the Amazon the size of Switzerland. Which is pretty amazing in its own right. However look at the size of it compared (top middle, left of Belem) to the rest of the country. Stuff like this fascinates me. It’s called Ilha de Marajó if you’re interested…

And to continue in the nerd vein, in a spare moment on bus I worked out how far my travels in the last four months have taken me. 18,000km so far, give or take, all of it overland. I’ll leave you to figure out how much that is in miles.

That’s it for the nerdy stuff for the time being, off to the beach now.