The morning I left Marrakech, I had a 1:50,000 topo sheet folded across the passenger seat and a compass bungeed to the dashboard. The truck's GPS module had failed three days earlier somewhere south of Ouarzazate — a quiet refusal to acquire satellites that I chose to read as a sign. Navigation had become too easy, and ease had made me inattentive to the landscape rolling past the windows.
Dead Reckoning Across the Atlas
The Atlas crossings demand a kind of attention that automated navigation actively discourages. Every junction becomes a decision point — terrain association, distance estimation, and sometimes just gut instinct read against contour lines. I kept a logbook on the centre console: bearing, distance, elapsed time. The same method military surveyors used to map these passes seventy years ago.
A map is a conversation between the landscape and the person reading it. A GPS track is a monologue delivered to someone who stopped listening.