Don’t trust Google Maps

The failure mode is not that the map is missing — it’s that it looks like it’s working. Harry has now lost most of a day to it in one country, been unable to use it at all in another, and found it simply outclassed by a domestic app in a third.

The three ways it fails, in his experience:

• It routes you onto roads your vehicle can’t legally use.
• It is blocked outright, along with the rest of the Western internet.
• It exists but isn’t the one people actually use, so its data is worse than the local alternative’s.
• The search result is not the place. A landmark’s name can belong to a street as well, and the top hit may be the street.

The check to make before you set off is not does it load — it’s what do people here navigate with.

How Harry applies it

Vietnam is the expensive lesson. Riding a rented motorbike north from Hanoi, Google Maps sends him onto an expressway with a no-bikes sign three separate times, each turnaround adding an hour to a day already running late. It refuses to show motorcycle routing at all. What eventually fixes it is deleting the app and reinstalling it — after which the bike routes appear. Then, on the last stretch, it confidently describes an off-road dirt track as a road.

China is where it stops pretending. Google Maps and the Western internet are blocked outright, which is one of the reasons that trip runs entirely on Jim — see travel with a local guide.

South Korea is the quiet version. It works badly rather than not at all; there is a domestic mapping app that people actually use, and Harry gets by on Google Maps for public transport alone and flags it as something to plan around.

Pakistan is the cheap version of the same mistake, and the one most likely to catch anyone out. Booking a ride to the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, Harry typed the name, took the top result, and was driven half an hour to a road called Wazir Khan on the wrong side of the city. Nothing was broken and the app did what he asked; the name simply belonged to two things. Check what the destination pin actually is before you get in, not after.

Demonstrated in

• Foreigners Explore Old Town Lahore🇵🇰 — the top search result for a famous mosque turns out to be a street with the same name.
• Solo Journey to Vietnam’s Border with China 🇻🇳 — three expressway turnarounds, no bike routing until the app is reinstalled, and a dirt track filed as a road.
• I Ignored the Media and Visited China 🇨🇳 — blocked entirely, along with the rest of the Western internet.
• I Tested 5 Star Korean Treatments in Seoul 🇰🇷 — works poorly in South Korea, where a domestic app is what everyone else is using.
• Solo in Colombia’s Best City! Medellin 🇨🇴 — a cash machine in Medellín missing from the map entirely, found by asking three people in the street. And then the doubling that makes it worth recording: having walked a long way to that specific bank to avoid a withdrawal fee, he arrives to find it has run out of money. The map was wrong about where it was and silent about whether it worked, which no map is going to tell you.