Google Earth
 

I have discovered a novel way of planning a route.I have been trying to get some decent maps of Northern Mozambique and have been struggling, until I found "Google Earth" and awsome package for free! If you have a GPS even better. I have been able to plan a route from Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania to South Africa using this package. It is a sattelite image of the earth which you can zoom down close enough in most cases to see the roads! I was able to use the package to identify GPS waypoints and then input them on my GPS.You can also download from the GPS to the software and then print out a map or image. It is pretty accurate as well. I road my bike out of Dubai along a route and then downloaded it onto the software and it was bang on the road I was riding. ( the map on the GPS shows me slight off the road!!! som much for Garmin's base map!!) It worthwhile taking a look at if you are in deperate need of Maps or Route planning. I believe the images are about 3- 4 yrs old which in most cases more modern than most maps. And you can literaly see if the road exists!! Quite usefull. Has anyone else tried it?

Google Earth is the kind of thing that could stop me ever riding a motorbike again... I could sit and surf the world all day every day. Amazing resource.

(Having said that, when it comes to getting on the bike, I'm a bit old-fashioned. Bike + road is enough for me. Can't be doing with all this new-fangled technology!)

Agreed if you are riding in "reasonable" places, Africa in some parts can be quite surprising when roads that maps show, cease to exist and some terrain becomes impassable, bridges disappear etc...... but yes... bike,road and plenty of time is the right recipe.