Customer Reviews

Zambia Map (Travel Reference Map)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While early in the planning stages for a recent expedition to Zambia, I purchased this map bundled with the Zambia & Victorial Falls Travel Map (Globetrotter Maps). The Zambia Map by Treaty Oak is clearly superior, and makes the other map unnecessary -- I have since lost my copy of the latter and I don't miss it.

The Zambia Map came with me to Zambia as we drove around the country. It provides little local detail -- Chris McIntyre's Zambia guide is good for that, but it is generally accurate with regard to road conditions (which range from pristine pavement to rutted tyre tracks) and provides the kind of big picture scope that is necessary when driving from Chipata to Lusaka or Mkushi to Livingstone.

The main flaw of the Zambia Map is that it under-reports the availability of services in various towns. The map has symbols for camping, petrol, and ATMs, but I constantly found those things to be more available than the chart suggested. This leads to a bit of "wolf crying". For example, the map shows no petrol in Samfya (the nearest marked petrol is in Mansa), and I had to arrange two jerry cans to carry extra fuel from Serenje. But when I got to Samfya, there was in fact a petrol station. This type of situation could easily lead the naive to believe that petrol is available everywhere, whether tha map shows it or not.

A minor but sometimes confusing shortcoming of this map is that elevation is strikingly color-coded but international borders are not. When you are out on the road, mountains, swamps and plateaus are clearly evident, whereas changes in politics and travel policies are not.

Overall, this is a valuable map for any visitor to Zambia, and I will purchase a fresh, unmarked, cleanly-folded copy for when I return to that country.