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Nature is full of clues to help you find your way – if you know where to look. Stuart Heritage lets go of the GPS to learn the art of natural navigation from pioneer Tristan Gooley
[...] How to navigate in a city
Look for satellite dishes. They all point towards the equator. In London, that is roughly south-southeast.
Find an 'invisible handrail' and use it to remember your bearings. In the countryside, this might be a river. In a city, it could be a main road.
Look at a tree. Do the branches point a certain way? That's probably south. Are the leaves on those branches smaller than the leaves on the opposite side? That's definitely south.
Use the sun. It rises in the east, sets in the west and moves through the southern sky, giving you a very basic compass.
Need to get home? Head against the flow of people at the start of the day or with the flow at the end and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a station.
Source: Ditching the satnav: the lost secrets of natural navigation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:58PM (1 child)
Using the sun doesn't work very well when you get far from the equator. Around here in the northern US, the Sun is often more South than either east or west. And it gets worse the further you get.
(Score: 1) by evilcam on Friday May 18 2018, @03:32AM
As an Aussie, travelling to the northern hemisphere totally fucked my bearings until I got used to North and South being the opposite of what I instinctively thought they were because the sun tracks through the 'wrong' part of the sky.
Next time you see a lost tourist, be gentle; they're probably doubly lost!