I am Dibakar, your level 8 local guide from Bangalore, India. I love to travel and traveling with google maps as a local guide has its own charm.
I still remember my first review on google maps. 6 years ago I passed out of my college, with emotions inside, I rated my college and uploaded pics.
Since then, I have reviewed 250+ places & uploaded 1850+ photos. My involvement as a local guide is increasing day by day. Now I am heavily dependent on other local guides’ reviews to pick a place to visit with friends or to pick a restaurant to take my wife for a romantic dinner and most of the times I come back satisfied because everyone provide genuine reviews. And after every events, now I get the urge to review about the place to earn karma 
and to help others.
The 3rd most interesting thing I’ve done - starring my google maps
As a local guide, I have grown this habit to star a place on google maps worth remembering or recommending to friends and families. With time my google maps have become cluttered and I love this. Starring places have helped me to visit a nice restaurant on my way a some place (repeated or sharing same route). Now when I zoom out in my google maps, I am not able to see few areas in my google maps because of the starts and my wish & goal is to reach that day when I don’t see the whole google maps because of the stars when I zoom out. 
The 2nd most interesting thing I’ve done - exploring the world virtually
As a local guide, exploring the google maps to suggest some edit or to answer questions or to add new places or to explore the world virtually. Situations when I cannot go around (
like now when I am home quarantined as my country is under lock-down due to Covid-19), I start visiting places around the world virtually and read local guide reviews of random places and start imagining going there. I love to explore the places with street view. Can’t thank google maps enough to provide this amazing feature. Someday I find myself traveling to Saariselkä, Finland witnessing the northern lights and the other day I am in Faroe Islands enjoying the beauty of Sørvágsvatn lake. I get mixed feeling doing this exercise. I get happy seeing the mesmerizing places the earth has to show 
and I become sad thinking how much I want to love traveling and how little I have covered so far. 
The 1st most interesting thing I’ve done - gaining geographic knowledge
I am a mechanical engineer with very minimal knowledge about history, geography or IT. As a local guide
and exploring google maps being my pass time, I have gained descent knowledge about geography. And I am loving it. I now have a better understanding of terrains, countries sharing borders with each others, equator crossing places or the shape of prime meridian. I would like to share 2 interesting facts I recently got to know.
- Tristan da Chuna is the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world: It is 3344 km away from Rio de Janeiro (west), 2787 km away from Cape Town (east), 4828 km from Monrovia (north) & 1800 km from Antarctica (south).
- There is 24 hours of time difference between Hawaii and Napari: Ideally the prime meridian should be a straight vertical line but due to political reason it is not. It is angled and even horizontal in couple of areas making two places Hawaii and Napari lying in two different time zones with no horizontal distance.
It is truly amazing to see how google map has touched my life, how it has become an integral part of my life and what all interesting things google maps has to offer me as a local guide. I feel proud to call myself as a level 8 local guide and the content when I see my reviews have 140+ thousand views and photos have 2.1+ million views and realize how I have helped someone out there directly/indirectly.