Make Sure You Have a Map: (and Other Bits of Travel Advice I'm Glad I Ignored)

What’s the worst travel advice you’ve ever been given?

Well-meaning counsel from friends, family, and fellow travelers such as “be careful what you eat,” “don’t accept gifts from people you don’t know,” and “never hitchhike” can be helpful—but what happens when you choose to go your own way?

Through her journeys across six continents, traveler and author Bryanna Plog has seen first-hand that there are exceptions to every rule, and that some travel advice is, to put it simply, just plain wrong. Covering adventures in Norway, Peru, Tanzania, Costa Rica, Australia, and beyond, Make Sure You Have a Map (and Other Bits of Travel Advice I’m Glad I Ignored) is a collection of witty travel tales from ten years of Plog’s travels, as she learned—sometimes the hard way—what advice to heed and what to disregard.

Is it worthwhile to go somewhere for just a weekend? If you eat steak at a tango show in Buenos Aires, have you fallen into a tourist trap? Is “sticking to the trail” actually the best way to explore the grizzly-filled wilderness of Katmai National Park, Alaska? As you travel with the author to more than a dozen countries, Make Sure You Have a Map shares some practical travel tips as well, including how to act on buses in Tanzania, which type of coffee to drink in Colombia (and which to avoid), what to see if you’re ever in Naples, Italy, and what to expect if you ever take a four-day train trip across the United States.

From remote villages in East Africa to the bustling airports of Europe, from Australian train journeys to boat trips on the Amazon, the twenty stories in Make Sure You Have a Map are a delightful exploration of both good and bad travel advice, the joy of breaking the rules, and the world we all share.

Destinations in the book include Australia (train journey between Melbourne and Sydney), Antarctica, Scotland, Italy (Naples), Norway (the Arctic), Germany (Berlin and Freiburg), Costa Rica (the Caribbean), Colombia, Peru (the Andes and the Amazon), Brazil (the Amazon), Argentina (Buenos Aires and Patagonia), Canada (Vancouver), the United States (train journey between Seattle and New York; Katmai NP, Alaska; and San Juan Islands, Washington), and Tanzania (Arusha, Dar es Salaam, and more).