I have been part of the local guides program since the beginning of its launch in 2015. And prior to that I was still contributing to Google Maps through City Experts and Google Map Maker.
My journey with the program began because of my frequent travelling through rural Tanzania building health care & treatment centers. Some of these places where I had to travel to were not even on Google maps and if they were there was not much information, not even roads!
This was a main road to get to a small village -Lukwati, Tanzania. Since there was no road shown on maps, we had to rely on Satellite view. And we sometimes confused dried river beds for roads such as this one here.
But it was quite nice going through part of the world knowing it has been untouched and quite unexplored. We would find wild animals casually grazing, something that most tourists would have to pay huge fees to see by entering in Game Park such as the Serengeti.
It was important for me to share part of my country to the rest of the world. When I would visit a small town or village, my first step was to look for a place to stay. I would add this place and other useful places to google maps so that the next person (most likely my colleague!) would find it much easier than I did. Places such as fuel stations, lodgings and eating points are important for travelers
One of the most incredible places I stayed at that was not on Google Maps was an Eco lodge in Northern Malawi.
I was told of this place by a traveler I met during one of my trips. It was up in a mountain overlooking Lake Nyasa/Malawi and I could not believe how beautiful it was. I got to chatting with the owners and told them that I would add the lodge to Google Maps so that other travelers could find them.
Fast forward to today, I now live in Norway where I spend a lot of time hiking the outdoors with my partner. I have left the editing of these trails to my partner whilst I write reviews which I hope will be useful to other travelers.
One place which I edited that I thought was very important was the starting point of the hike which was supposed to be a very easy child friendly walk. It was unfortunately the starting point of a technical hike and was quite unsafe for us and we never go to visit the view point.
I did not want this mistake to happen to other people so I edited it to make sure it was clear that this was the starting point for the technical walk. We later saw that this information was also written on the sign board, however we missed that.
By being part of the Local Program, I can share important information about places which can be helpful to to others to make decisions. It does feel good to see my places such as the Technical Walk point mentioned above getting a “like” which hopefully means that it actually helped someone.