Leave the UK and you leave behind the awesomeness of the Ordnance Survey, but digital mapping has made things one hell of a lot easier.
If you've ever spent four hours queuing at a South American military facility in the hope of photocopying a distinctly dubious military map of the Andes - don't ask how I know etc - you'll appreciate just how wonderful the Ordnance Survey's UK mapping really is.
Forget the annoying digitial licensing labyrinth and the weird quango-esque internal structures for a bit and just think about how lucky we are to have some of the most accurate tophographical mapping in the world freely available to buy over the counter.
Other countries have topographical mapping too, but it's rarely a patch on ours - Spanish mapping, for example, depicts urban areas in, erm, pink. I mean, pink? And it's also hellishly hard to find when you need it, particularly in advance.
Which is where the increasing availability of foreign digital mapping from UK specialists is revolutionising the travel and trekking experience - the likes of Satmap, Anquet, Memory Map and Quo now offer a range of popular foreign maps, so you can purchase and plan before you go.
On a recent trip to southern Spain and the Sierra Nevada, Satmap very kindly loaned me an appropriate map pack on an SD card for our long-term test Active 10 unit and it was absolutely superb. If anything, the weird alien nature of maps you're not used to, makes the addition of integrated GPS accuracy and a little dot showing exactly where you are, even more handy than it is at home.
And although it's something that's rarely said, knowledge, in navigational terms is power - the power to go where you want, when you want without relying on guides books, guides or a dodgy photocopy of a Bolivian military survey...
