Again, the issue here appears to be that you can buy maps maybe in Bogota, reams’ of em, but not so much here… although thinking like the locals to some degree means thinking in terms of trails and valleys and rivers, not maps, but I am ready for a good map.
Google Earth
It supplies some good info, but not really useable for navigation. Things are put in the wrong places by armatures (armatures Donny!), and as much as it is fun to play with, the detail is not there. There are also issues with cloud cover in the pictures. The one that streams to PC’s gives you altitude and other helpful things, which is better than the dumbed down version on this IPad.
Falconview.com
I seems to be the best online mapping resource, and looking at it for about one second taught me something I wanted to know about the long valley approaches. It’s a 200 mb download to a PC. I had never heard about it before,but a young Army Officer I met up in the Sierra told me it was what they used, so I might as well also. I downloaded it to the PC in my hotel,but couldn’t get it to work, but from what could tell, this is the gold standard for Internet mapping in Colombia, and perhaps the world. There is no Tablet Version yet for nonmilitary.
Military Maps
Without going into detail, I was given access to a pair of military maps with a lot of info that was fascinating on the security situation, but I would describe the maps as better than average but not good enough to navigate by. The scale on these maps was like 1:100,000 or 200,000, and a centimeter was a kilometer, so as much as it offered a cool overview, it wasn’t good enough to use, say, to get in from the north over open country. But given how you need to rely on local knowledge and you end up following Indigenous foot trails anyhow, it might do in a pinch. I wonder if they have maps on the 1:24,000 or so scale for real operations, and if I could get these… Bogota again would be my guess…
It did however have the name of every river and native settlement of more than maybe 100 people, the best I have seen so far. I was allowed to take pictures of these maps which I will post soon.
The Maps in the Library:
There were two in the back of the Library of the NAtional Bank (literally on the second floor of what is like the Colombian Federal Reserve Branch on Carrera 9 (9th avenue) and Calle 16 (16th St) in Valledupar.
One was a three-dimensional multi colored graphic which highlighted the vertical dimensions of the Sierra from the South West perspective, and another seemed to focus on Indigenous areas, and was mostly brown, and did have some detail.