Customer Reviews

Ngdm African Adventure Atlas (National Geographic)

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We can call it a road atlas. However, in that field it fails. Poor, difficult to read mapping (like white roads on very light gray background), plenty of empty space, no small roads, no coordinates grid, no relief shading or coloring, only limited amount of interesting places marked on the maps etc. I bought it in hopes I could use it for Africa overland travels, but it is way too limited. Very nice concept but poor implementation. If you only want to drive through "highways" and are on budget then this atlas may be somewhat useful, but probably Michelin Africa regional maps 741, 745 and 746 at 1:4.000.000 scale are better investment. It contains some maps of national parks and town that may be useful. Southern part of this atlas is advertised as 1:1.000.000 scale, however that does not mean it has more details! Actual mapping in this atlas is done by South African company Map Studio and their other atlases are same low mapping standard as well.

This atlas fills a void in the geography and travel reference world. While it does cover a lot of ground, there is much that is missing. Regardless of what the folks at National Geographic intended, the buyers of this book are expecting an atlas. But this is an atlas that does not even have a decent political map of the whole continent. There is no physical map, no information at all about languages, religions, ethnic groups, population density, climate, vegetation, natural hazards or even wildlife. So what is in this atlas? There are maps covering all of Africa, maps of major cities, and maps of areas with high concentrations of national parks. There is plenty of ecotourism information and nice pictures. The maps though leave much to be desired. They basically show roads, towns and parks on a whitish background with very faint relief shading. There is no attempt to portray the nature of the landscape or the topography in any meaningful way (are we in a desert or in a jungle?), they completely forgot about railroads, and in this day of GPS navigation there is no latitude/longitude reference grid. All in all rather disapointing. Hopefully the next editon will make up for some of these shortcomings. Unfortunately it will probably be several years.