Santarém To Belém - We Ran Out Of River

Daybreak on our last full day on the river could hardly have been more depressing. The sky I could see from my hammock was a grey-brown colour, and the smell of burning wood was stronger than ever. We were in the middle of the river and there was very little visibility. It hardly even makes It into the news headlines any more, our ability to adapt to the mess we have created means that relatively few people are aware of just how serious the situation is as Amazonía burns.

Fortunately we were not going to spend all of the last leg with the smog. Slowly the sky started to clear, and things seemed better again. The forest on either side even looked a bit more like It had in the upper part of the river.

We hadn’t realised that this was going to be one of the best river watching days of the whole trip. As you get nearer the end the river splits and spreads, and there are some relatively narrow channels. So for a few hours in the afternoon we had great views of life on the river banks. Then in the afternoon we got some much needed rain as a storm passed overhead.

More entertainment was provided by having the final of the Copa Libertadores shown live on TV on the upper deck. Then It was down to the hammocks for the final night. The boat had got busier as we stopped on the way, and there were hammocks everywhere, making It quite hard to move around. I didn’t sleep that much, I spent a couple of hours in the middle of the night reflecting on the journey and thinking a bit about what was to come after the big river.

As the sun came up we were already close to Belém, but the boat had to do a circuit around some islands before reaching the city. It felt as if we were already at sea, the boat moving with the swell and the land now far away. But as we moved into the channel approaching Belém we got our last views. After doing more or less 3500 km of river from Iquitos It was finally time to roll up the hammock. Was It worth it? You bet It was.

The Last Boat - Santarém To Belém

Another early start, the day had come for getting on our last boat, the one that would take us to Belém. It wasn’t a promising start, I opened the window in the hotel and the smell of wood smoke was stronger than on any other day here. With limited visibility over the river.

We walked down to the port to find that the boat was already there. The Amazon Star had come down quite full from Manaus and this time we weren’t going to be lucky with our choice of hammock position. It was more a question of finding any free position, which we managed somehow with hammock ropes almost crossing.

Despite the grand sounding name the Amazon Star is a fairly basic boat, we had been spoiled a bit with our boat to Santarem. But It had an open space upstairs and a well stocked bar. The only things that let us down were the views of the river, the smog caused by fires was to be with us for some time to come.

The day was hot, despite the sun being partially blocked. But the boat made good progress. I was glad when the sun started to go down and we made a little detour to stop at the town of Monte Alegre. The night was fresher, I was just hoping that we would get through the smog for the final part of the journey. This was not how I wanted It to end.

Alter do Chão

So we found something to do with our extra day in Santarém. The Guardian published an article in 2009 on the 10 best beaches in Brazil and there at number 1 is Alter do Chão. This qualifies It as a ‘hidden gem’ which these days means that only 50 million people know about It.

The bus from Santarém to Alter do Chão takes about an hour, and dropped us off just a couple of minutes from the beach. White sands, sparkling river wáter, with forest in the background - It is a beautiful place although I’m not convinced It will be the most beautiful in all of Brazil.

It was quiet too, most of the bars and restaurants on the beach were closed. Clearly not peak season. But the one place that was operating still did good business serving drinks and food to tables that are placed in the water a couple of metres off the beach.

A very relaxing day, with another boat trip just ahead of us. There wasn’t nuch OSM mapping going on either, although we took advantage of the wait for the bus to add a few more points in the town.

Santarém

My first impressions of Santarém were not very favourable. I had the idea of It being a smaller city, but It covers a wide área and our hostal was quite a distance from the centre. Three nights we had here, and It wasn’t clear what we could with that time.

We walked to the centre and found nice places to be by the river, and a restaurant serving regional dishes, including one (Maniçoba) where they have to cook the manioc leaves for days to remove the toxins. I’m still here to tell the story so they must have done It right.

The first full day we dedicated to exploring the centre and looking for another hotel not so far from the port for our final night. There was, naturally, some mapping to be done as we walked around. Outside of the centre there were areas with few amenities mapped.

The haze from the fires comes and goes in the city, with the wind. But at times the smell of smoke is very strong, and the pollution gets to your eyes and throat. Glad I don’t live here, Madrid ‘s traffic pollution is seriously unhealthy but not as bad as this.

Manaus To Santarém

Another early morning start as we walked down to the port at dawn to catch the Santarém boat. This time there was none of the queuing and complication that we had in Tabatinga - we showed our ticket and went straight on to the boat.

The early bird catches the best hammock position, and the first impressions of the Madame Crys were positive. It seemed to be a more modern boat than for Tabatinga to Manaus. It didn’t fill up completely but was busy and we did the right thing getting there early.

As we left Manaus It was clear that this was a more powerful, but less noisy, boat. We were up front looking for the meeting of the waters as the appropriately named Río Negro joins the Amazon a short distance out from Manaus For kilometres the two rivers run with little mixing and very different colours, and our boat steered very close to the visible dividing line.

By now of course the river is very wide, although still the boat often takes a course closer to one side. We were now seeing a different forest from that of the upper Amazon, less dense and with much more signs of human impact and settlement.

Lunch confirmed that we were on a smarter boat, the food was similar style to the previous boat but noticeably better. We had a bar that sold beer and plenty of space on the upper deck for river watching. Mealtimes were still early, so not long after dark we were already settling in the hammocks for the night.

Daybreak was hazy over the river, as It had been approaching Manaus. The boat stopped in a couple of places on the way, quite large towns like Obidos and Parintins. It was a relatively short 30 hour journey, short by Amazonia standards.

By mid afternoon we could see Santarém ahead of us, we arrived more or less on time. First priority on arriving was ensuring we had out tickets for the next, and final, boat to Belém. We were going to have one more day than expected in Santarém but were still on target for getting to the end. The taxi driver who took us to our hostel explained the hazy visibility. Fires in the región, and this was more or less a normal situation here.

Manaus

I had very mixed feelings about returning to Manaus, 36 years after my first failed attempt at an Amazon boat ride to Belém. I hadn”t expected ever to return, had it not been for the FOSS4G announcement of Belém as the 2024 location. I hadn’t liked the city much the first time, although this had a lot to do with the local climate. Maybe I’m a bit more used to this now, after living so many years in Spain, but Manaus still felt like the hottest place I had been on the journey.

We got a new member of the team here, my partner Silvia flew in from Madrid just a few hours after the Tabatinga boat had docked. When she booked her flight back in August we had very little idea of when I was going to arrive in Manaus, in the end it worked out very well.

First priority was getting a hammock for Silvia and then finding out when we could leave, there was no boat heading to Belém for a few days, so plan B was to buy a ticket part of the way, to the city of Santarem where we would be able to connect with the Belém boat. With this done we had a day and a hall to relax in Manaus, there was more live music outdoors in the centre in the evening and some more beers in what was already our favorite Manaus bar.

We obviously had to do a bit of mapping in Manaus, and because we wanted to do a visit to the opera house on the second day we chose the square opposite for an OSM data refresh. The opera house is another legacy of the Amazonian rubber boom times, built for the élite in the city who wanted to live as if they were in Europe. These days it is more of a resource for everyone with a wider range of events.

The rest of the day was relaxing, having some drinks with people we had met on the previous boat and a reasonably early night as we had been told to get to the port by 6 the following morning. Time to move on again, and this time at last I was going to leave Manaus on a boat.

Tabatinga To Manaus 3

By day 3 on the Manaus boat I was beginning to doubt that we might get there the next day. It seemed the boat was moving too slowly, we were tracking the route and there was a lot of river still before Manaus.

What we didn’t know is that the boat stops less on the second half of the journey, I guess because many of the places further downstream have their own services to Manaus. It did stop briefly in the river a couple of times just to let people off onto a smaller boat that was waiting.

The main event of the third day was a fairly thorough police check of the boat. I was fast asleep in my hammock when It happened, men had to line up on one side of the deck, women on the other. All baggage was also lined up in the middle so they could pass the sniffer dog by everything. We were stopped about an hour for this, it’s quite a routine thing on public transport here, I was told.

By day 4 people had been asking the crew when we were like to arrive and It all seemed good with the estimates for arrival in the evening. I really didn’t want to arrive in Manaus in the middle of the night. I enjoyed the experience of the first hammock boat but four days is long enough to go without a decent night”s sleep.

After what seemed like an eternal circuit on the approach to the city we finally docked on the Río Negro. An atmospheric walk up from the port to a hotel with a proper bed and a nearby bar with good live music and cold beer. I felt I deserved It.

Tabatinga To Manaus 2

Sleeping solidly is not that simple, the boat can stop at any time of night, and it turns out the range of comfortable sleeping positions in a hammock is not that big. But it doesn’t matter, the only schedule on board revolves around meal times, there’s nothing else to prevent anyone from resting when they feel like it. It can also be surprisingly cold on the open boat at night. I came prepared with a thin blanket and it’s not unusual to feel the need for a cover during the night. The first night there was also a distraction, a spectacular lightning display in the distance.

Day 2 started with our early breakfast, a ham roll and a cup of ridiculously sweet coffee. If there is one thing I really dislike in Brazil it is this custom where the people who make the coffee decide how much sugar the person who drinks the coffee is going to want. It’s always a lot, obviously there is a major sugar cane surplus. I managed to get some progress done on my diary entries and then it was river watching as a big rain storm moved in whilst the boat was ar one of the stops. In 20 minutes water was pouring down all the slopes towards the port. A small creek under a wooden bridge transformed into a torrent. All water still welcome in tbe Amazon, looking at the banks of the river I reckon there is room in the river for 8-10 metres more of water.

Bit by but you get to know other passengers, all watching the river from the best viewpoint next to the bar with no beer. Colombia, Perú, New Zealand, the US , and Italy were all represented in addition to the Brazilian locals.

The Second Boat -Tabatinga To Manaus

Departure day from Tabatinga and the start of the real adventure. Be here at 8, they told us when we bought the tickets, so here we were not much after that time, but once the people waiting for the fast boat had left there was just a handful of us. I didn’t mind, the early arrivals get the best hammock space and 4 days is a long time to spend in the wrong spot.

Orderly lines of baggage were formed as people took a seat to wait. Then mysterious queues started forming, the first to exchange the paper ticket for a wristband. The second was for a police photo and passport check, if you don’t do this you don’t get on the boat I was told. More people arrived and by scheduled departure time at 12 the two queues were still being processed. Finally the doors opened and off we went up to the top deck of the F/B Diamante. Picking a spot near a window we tested our hammocks for size, it turned out that I was almost touching the floor until I knotted both ends. No need for the extra rope here.

We left in the end a couple of hours late, but our deck was nowhere near full and the space we had chosen seemed good for views and air. There was something missing on the boat though. Searching for a celebratory beer to mark the start of the hammock days we found a snack bar at the top of the boat that had no beer. Suddenly 4 days seemed like a very long time.

Then there were the meal times that would be challenging even for northern Europeans, breakfast at 6:30, lunch starting at 10:30 and dinner at 5pm. But we had our sleeping and resting position set, spaces up front and at the back for river watching and life was good. We had managed to get 2 Brazilian SIM cards the day before, but we discovered that these would really only work well when the boat stopped somewhere.

Dinner time came around and we had a chance to sample the unexciting cuisine on board. Stewed beef with some beans and rice set the tone for the coming days. But it’s included in the ticket price, it’s edible and there will be time ahead for better meals. And then before dark another fabulous river sunset behind us to match the one we saw coming down from Iquitos.

On this kind of voyage you start to test the reality against what you had imagined it might be like. I had thought that I wouldn”t worry about when I slept because I could lie awake at night listening to the sounds of the forest. No. The sound you hear day and night is the boat’s engine. Then there is the doubt about how much you can see from the boat when it is sailing down the middle of such a big river. The reality here is that you do see quite a bit, the boat rarely steers the middle course, at least in the upper Amazon. There are numerous islands and sandbanks so much of the time you are not even seeing the full width of the river. And in the stops you see the local towns.

You dont’t see a lot of wildlife, fleeting glimpses of the Amazonian pink dolphins as they surface for a second or two and a selection of river birds. Thankfully there was also a very limited presence of unwanted wildlife, mosquitoes are only a potential problem when the boat stops, out on the river with the breeze they are virtually absent. In short I never felt bored or that time dragged. Obviously finger typing this diary on a tablet also takes a while.

The Triple Frontier 3

Monday was a list of things to do, the last day before departure for Manaus. Priority number one was to move from a hostel too far away from the crossing into Tabatinga to one that was almost on the frontier, a pillar 10 metres away from our rooms marked the boundary. A brief stop for breakfast and down to Tabatinga port to buy our boat tickets, again checking out hammocks on the way.

On the way back, boat tickets bought, we found the hammocks we would need as a bed for much of the following two weeks. I didn’t want to go for the cheapest, I was looking for one that hopefully wouldn”t break and leave me sleeping on the deck. This time, unlike my previous attempt so many years before, it felt like the hammock and boat experience was really going to happen. I won’t pretend I didn’t feel nervous. We also bought cutlery, bowls and cups for the journey. Back in Leticia it was down to the market looking for rope, useful to either extend the hammock if needed or to secure luggage. A decent dinner in Leticia was needed, we didn’t have high hopes about the food we would be eating for the next four days. Writing in hindsight we were right about that.

The Triple Frontier 2

Day two in Leticia began with another visit to Tabatinga. It was Sunday and the boat ticket office wasn’t going to be open, but we did need to get our Brazilian entry stamp in our passports, we weren’t going to get on the next boat without that. Remote land borders can often be more difficult to cross than arriving at international airports, but we had no problems here - a couple of questions about the purpose of our visit and it was done.

With the rest of the day free we went back to Leticia and got on a boat to Santa Rosa for the last time on Peruvian territory on this journey. Johnattan was carrying a small drone, and we wanted to do a bit of drone and street level mapping of the island. All of the main points of interest on Santa Rosa are concentrated on a single road, so we mapped our way up from the clutch of restaurants facing Leticia to a midpoint in the village and decided that the heat merited a refreshment stop in a friendly and spacious bar restaurant.

This restaurant became the base for an attempt at drone mapping Santa Rosa, but there was an unexpected problem. Both Tabatinga and Leticia have airports, and as Johnattan attempted to get the drone to fly at a decent height we realized that the drone exclusion area for these airports covered almost all of Santa Rosa.It was not going to happen, so we sat down for lunch - an Amazon river fish ceviche - and then finished our ground level mapping of the main street. Before the trip I had looked at Santa Rosa as a possible place to stay and decided there just wasn’t much there. But in fact it’s not a bad option if what you like is a quiet laid-back atmosphere with a backpacker traveller feel to it.There’s a handful of places to stay and enough bars and restaurants in support. And most of them are now mapped!

We headed out quite early for dinner in Leticia, the objective being a slightly fancier and more touristy restaurant we had seen. its pretty quiet on the triple frontier in mid-November, most places don’t stay open very late. But the rain came again, hard and fast - we had no choice but to take refuge for an hour in a nearby bar. Dinner for me was more river fish, gamitana this time - taking the chance to try things I may never see again. A walk back to the hostel and a relatively early night, the next day was going to be busy.

The Triple Frontier

With an eye on our (OSM powered) maps the first surprise on arrival at Santa Rosa was that we were being dropped off on what appeared on the map to be a separate island. Our moto taxi driver explained the reason for this, the drought that had affected so much of Amazonia had also changed the endpoint for a ferry that had been unable to run a few weeks before our arrival. In reality the two islands shown on the map are currently one, with a dip on the muddy track being the only indicator.

The triple frontier is a curious place, there are no formal border control posts, you have to go on arrival from Iquitos to the immigration office in Santa Rosa to get the Peruvian exit stamp, a pre-condition for subsequently getting entry into Colombia or Brazil. We were almost the first ones there at the office and the exit process took about 5 minutes. Then it was down to the boats that take you across to Leticia (in Colombia) or neighbouring Tabatinga (in Brazil). It’s a short crossing, I had read a couple of months earlier that in the worst moments of the drought people were able to cross on foot. That’s no longer the case, but the creek taking us in to Leticia had barely enough water to permit incoming and outgoing boats to get past each other.

Although we were landing in Colombia there are still no border formalities, only if you try to go somewhere else in the country outside of Leticia. So we had arrived in Peru, had our hostal accommodation in Colombia, and would be leaving from Brazil. Leticia has much more facilities than Santa Rosa or Tabatinga, it seemed like the best place of the three to stay.

The walk to the hostel was longer than we had expected, and with the sun out and carrying all our stuff it was the first time I really felt the Amazonian heat. But we had a relaxing start to the day, on the assumption from our research that we weren’t going to be leaving on the next boat from Tabatinga for at least a couple of days. A tasting of Colombian beers (Poker won first prize from the jury), a walk around the centre and lunch in the market watching the torrential downpour outside that would help restore the river and carry us to Belem. Then with the last of the rain we took a walk into Brazil, Tabatinga adjoins Leticia and there is an arch welcoming you to Brazil but again no further controls.

It’s still quite fascinating to see how things change when you cross even an open border like this. We walked through Tabatinga heading for the port and checking out places that sold hammocks, the main essential purchase for our no frills boat to Manaus. Down in the port they confirmed that there was a boat on the day we had expected, but we would have to return to buy the tickets because we still had no Brazilian money. We would have two more full days on the triple frontier. There would of course have to be some time for mapping.

The First Boat - Iquitos To The Triple Frontier

The boat from Iquitos was to be our sole concession to relative comfort on the river, foreigners have to pay a higher price for the ferry than locals, but the benefit was to be on the upper deck with more space, and an outside area at the back. There are faster boats doing this stretch of the river, but you are stuck inside the boat the whole time with very limited views of the river. Ours was the middle option between the three day slow boat and the fast service, and finally we were on our way down the Amazon.

Leaving in mid-afternoon we had about 3 hours of daylight left for river watching. The first proper sunset I had seen in Peru lit up the river before dark. And then we had a glorious full moon ahead of the boat, meaning that we had some visibility all night long. The ferry is quite modern and relatively fast, we even had a TV showing Peru playing Chile in a World Cup qualifier.

I slept on and off, partly because of trying to sleep stretched out on seats that weren’t uncomfortable but which were not designed for sleeping. Some of that time I spent watching the moonlt silhouette of the forest as we made our way down river. All those months of thinking and planning the adventure, and here we were. We were expecting an 18 hour journey, but in the end it was nearer to 15. Early morning and we were almost at Santa Rosa, the Peruvian river island on the triple frontier.

Iquitos

One more plane, and then the real Amazon journey begins. I think I read somewhere that Iquitos is the largest city in the world that has no road connection to other parts of the country It belongs to. So a plane was the only alternative to seven days on the Rio Ucayali.The plan was to get to Iquitos and leave as soon as we could get a boat, with roughly two weeks left before arrival in Belem at the beginning of December for FOSS4G. and SOTM LATAM. In the end it was to be an overnight stay, there was a ferry leaving the next day for the Triple Frontier shared by Peru, Colombia and Brazil.

With the ticket bought for the first leg we could relax and explore some of the city. Iquitos is bigger, and busier, than Pucallpa but the tuk tuk style transport still dominates. The days of the rubber boom, and associated exploitation of local people,are long gone. But some of the buildings from that time survive, We explored a museum telling some of that story and with a selection of some of the earliest maps made of Peruvian Amazonia. And of course we did our own small mapping contribution, adding some points of interest for the central area to OSM. Some of those were added whilst having a beer on the balcony of a metal building designed by Mr Eiffel himself and overlooking the main square - mapping is hot work in Amazonia.

Pucallpa

Iquitos wasn’t our first Amazonian destination, before we headed for Pucallpa - located on the Ucayali river much further south. Johnattan has worked there and is also heavily involved in the local OSM group. At one point we even considered starting the Belem boat trip in Pucallpa, the Ucayali combines with the Marañon river way down nearer to Iquitos to form the Peruvian Amazon. But an estimated seven additional days on a boat to Iquitos was a bit too much, another time maybe. I was dealing with the change of atmosphere from the western side of the Andes, it poured with rain shortly after arrival and moving around in tuk tuk style transport to get anywhere made it feel like a different country.

It was only a two night stopover, but there was OSM activity on tha agenda as we had a drone mapping demonstration and small scale mapping party in the grounds of the local intercultural university. We also got out for a short trip on the Ucayali too. When I was loading datasets for my Amazonian mapping project I was thinking about appropriate styling for the rivers of the region. They always end up blue on the maps, but the Ucayali is chocolate brown! Pucallpa would be an interesting place for an Amazonian State Of The Map, particularly with it having an established local mapping community.

Huaraz

We were in Huaraz for an event on climate justice organised by the South American Wikimedia community. A very interesting event, my first with Wikimedia, and with a particular emphasis on giving a voice to the representatives of indigenous communities. Including a forum involving Saul Luciano who took the German energy giant RWE to court in a landmark case for their contribution to emissions that help to melt the glaciers that in turn threatens a deadly lagoon overflow for those living in the flood path below. He said he had never seen the glaciers recede as much as they had this year. OSM got some time and mentions at the event, although it got me thinking about how communities with so much in common seem to live separate existences.

And we did some mapping, enough to refresh data for the centre of Huaraz. My first Peruvian changesets. As for the nearby mountains, I had taken a tough packing decision to fill valuable rucksack space with my mountain boots and a bit of winter clothing in case I had the chance for a day in the mountains. it didn’t happen, the weather wasn’t kind and the boots haven’t seen any use. Of course the views of snowy peaks had to be fantastic the next day as we flew back to Lima in preparation for moving onwards to Amazonia. A planned presentation/workshop in a Lima university never happened as a strike timed to coincide with the APEC international summit closed the university for three days.

Landing In Lima

There were nervous moments before starting the journey. The terrible drought this year across Amazonia even put the whole project in doubt, we couldn’t be sure that the boats would be running as reports came in of Amazonian towns suffering water shortages. Together with the brutal wildfire season it seemed that we had picked the wrong year, although the real question after 2 consecutive years of drought might be whether there will be better years to come? Hard to believe when I looked at the hydrological data I had loaded for the Amazon basin. At one point I was considering buying a reserve air ticket from Lima to Manaus, which would have been a very disappointing way to do that journey. In the end October brought better news, it rained enough for the boats to run and Johnattan organised a short Peruvian itinerary (including OSM mapping!) which would take us to Iquitos for the first boat down the river. The first of three or four that we would need to get all the way to Belem with an estimated travel time of two weeks.

I landed in Lima on the 5th November and had a couple of days to acclimatise before setting off for the first destination on the trip. Great ceviche in a market stall which the tourist guidebooks will hopefully never discover, and time to see some of the city. Even time to drink a bit too much pisco, but you have to try the local products? Then it was off to Huaraz, located at 3000 metres and lying below the Andean peaks of the Cordillera Blanca. What does this have to do with Amazonia? The mountain chain is where all the debate about the source of the Amazon is focused. You can hardly get more of a landscape contrast than that between the western and eastern sides of the Peruvian Andes. I went up to Huaraz on the bus, and through the desert surrounding Lima then upwards through a semi arid mountainous landscape which differs sharply from the forest to be found on the eastern slopes.

Big River - The Project To Go With The Trip

Once I had decided to make the trip down the river I thought it would be interesting and useful to have an Amazonian themed maps and data project. A couple of years ago, in FOSS4G in Florence, I attended a presentation about TerriaMap and it ticked a lot of the boxes for a plan I had to do an open data and maps catalogue for Madrid and possibly other regions of Spain.

I had installed the tool and done some fairly basic experiments - but with the Amazon journey already being booked the focus changed and I embarked on a possibly over ambitious attempt to combine multiple data sources for the whole Amazonia region. That means a significant part of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia. The project is online at Big River although for the moment it contains mostly base cartography sourced from national mapping agencies.

A lot of OSM data is in the queue to be loaded, already there in the case of Peru, and the first cross frontier thematic dataset covering the frightening wildfire season of 2024 across the entire Amazonian region is also in the pipeline. There’s a huge amount of open data available and work on the project will continue - but first I have to get down the big river!

How Did I Get Here?

Big River, or how to get to FOSS4G/SOTM LATAM in Belem the slow way. There’s a backstory here, the short version is that 36 years ago - on an extended journey from Costa Rica down to Rio de Janeiro - I tried and failed to get a boat trip down the Amazon from Manaus to Belem and the fine hammock I had bought on the way in Venezuela never got used. In the end I saw very little of the river. Time passed and the regrets faded until they announced that FOSS4G 2024 would be held in Belem.

The announcement got me thinking, obviously this was a chance to try again with at least part of the Amazon. And then, because I’m fairly light on work commitments at the moment, I started thinking that the journey could begin further up river than Manaus. Maybe even in Peru?

So back in April or May I sounded out Johnattan Rupire from the Peruvian OSM community to check whether it was a crazy idea to go to Belem from Iquitos by boat. It is a bit crazy, but it turned out that he was thinking of doing exactly the same trip. And with that, plus quite a bit of internet research on just how many boats we would need to get to make it happen, I got on a plane to Lima in early November.

First stop, Cercedilla

The Spanish government has decided to fully subsidise the regional train services around major Spanish cities for the rest of the year, to try and encourage people to use public transport more. Now I don’t use Madrid’s Cercanias services very often, because I work mostly from home, but I decided to get my free ticket and explore the region a bit more. Then it occurred to me that I could also take advantage of the offer to do a bit of OSM mapping in different places.

So yesterday I got on the train and headed to Cercedilla, sitting at the foot of Madrid’s mountains. It’s a station I have been to many times, but always to start a hike - you can walk straight out of the station and onto a trail that takes you up to those mountains. This time I headed for the nearby village, gathering addresses and points of interest as I went.

I was giving a test run to the Every Door application, presented by Ilya Zverev at this year’s State of the Map event in Florence. It worked very well for capturing the points of interest, the address and building interface was a little trickier to understand - but I liked it and will use it again. I need to check whether I can configure it a bit more so that I don’t need to add so much to the data later at home. But I can stop being the mapper with the old Garmin GPS for a while.

More OSM away days around Madrid will come, the free ticket lasts until the end of the year!