The humble old map

There isn't much better than a map. Collectively I have spent a great deal of time looking at maps in the last 32 years and I credit this for my wanderlust and knowledge of obscure capitals.

I like to think that if I had been born 400 years earlier I may have been an adventurer to foreign seas and lands, excited by the uncertainty of not knowing whether I would fall off the end of the world or not. But the reality is I would have been below deck, dead of scurvy a long time before the edge of the map came into view.

Here, the coast of north-western Sumatra.