The lost art of getting lost

00:00 05:56

Sean Thomas has narrated this article for you to listen to.

One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Syria and Peru (of which more later). I’ve done it in Yerevan airport, Armenia, where the car-rental guy was so amazed that someone wanted to hire a car to ‘drive around Armenia’ that he apparently thought I was insane. Later, having endured the roads of Armenia, I saw his point – though the road trip itself was a blast.

Recently I rented a motor in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they were slightly less surprised than the Armenian had been, but nonetheless gave me lots of warnings and instructions, chief of which was: ‘Don’t rely on Google Maps, it doesn’t work out here.’ As soon as I was told that I felt my heart lift, because it meant there was a fair chance of getting lost – and if I like renting cars in remote spots, I love getting lost, anywhere. And yet sadly, as technology gets ever more efficient, it becomes harder to end up completely clueless as to where you are. We are losing the fine art of getting lost.

Before the advent of Google Maps, GPS, Starlink and the rest, getting lost was a doddle. I’ve done it everywhere. Africa, Asia, the Americas, Surrey, the Antarctic peninsula (in a storm), Dartmoor. I’ve been really lost in south London without an A to Z (remember the A to Z?).

Amid this lexicon of lostness, some adventures still stand out. In Peru, while researching a thriller in the grey, weird, eerie Sechura desert north of Lima, I went looking for an ongoing archaeological dig, the excavations of which have revealed the unsettling sacrificial rites of the 2nd- to 9th-century Moche people, known for their incestuous sexual practices, culminating, it is thought, in the strangling of their own teenage children.