Off the byte path

When I was in Morocco several years ago, the familiar blue-with-a-red-star cover of Lonely Planet Morocco’s guidebook was everywhere; the herds of people who crowded every hostel all had the same one, and we found ourselves tracing the same roads as lots of other people.  The most memorable times from that trip came from following the advice of a local or deciding to leave the guidebook at home and strike out on my own; break into a deserted building in Berlin instead of looking for a hotel, eg.

Thanks to the internet and other techie devices, finding offbeat and off the beaten path places to go and things to do is easier than ever.  If you didn’t already know about Geocaching, all you need to do it is a handheld GPS and a sense of adventure; it’s a treasure hunt where YOU are the map.  The Degree Confluence Project aims to find out exactly what is at every meeting of degree lines in the world.

Metroblogging describes itself as the “world’s largest network of city-focused blogs,” with personal tips from denizens of cities all over the world (the most recent post on their homepage when I went there was from Islamabad).  The Yellow Arrow Project started as a way to mark sites of note that might not be in your standard guidebook; there’s a tree in New York that has a Yellow Arrow on it because it casts a lovely and unusual shadow at a particular time of day.  Using SMS messages on your phone, you get the story behind each Yellow Arrow tag and can leave your own story (and your own tag) in the same way.

Blogabond offers an interactive itinerary global map (available as a template you can put in your own blog) and a community focus, so you can scan other people’s maps, see where they’re going and why, and then plan your own trip.  And blog about it.  Mis-Guides is a guidebook/walking itinerary series based on “mytho-geography”, where fictional sites take as much precedence as factual ones.  Roadside America is a community-built list of strange attractions along the side roads of the United States, while Weird US offers tales of “local legends and best-kept secrets.”

With so many alternative things to find, why buy guidebooks at all?