Finding our way in Honduras

A few months ago Jana and I bought a car here in Honduras. We have been having fun exploring Tegucigalpa and finding new places and stores. However, 1 main question was still lingering – How do you find your way around in a foreign country?
In many US cities, there is a plethora of street signs guiding you to popular destinations, plus the street names and addresses are normally designed in a way that makes finding things quick and easy. But in Honduras there are few street signs, if the streets are named there is rarely an order to their naming, and there are no addresses.

Enter the magic of GPS. A few years ago we received a Garmin GPS for Christmas and enjoyed using it to find locations both locally and for road trips. On a whim, I decided to bring it with us to Honduras in hopes that it would work here as well. A little googling and I found the Open Street Map project, a web site that builds maps for the entire world that can be downloaded and installed to various GPS devices.

Using the Garmin here is a little different since addresses aren’t commonly used, and those that do exist I haven’t gotten the GPS to recognize. However, I can still search for locations by name by or by type such as shopping, gas, etc…

Links to the resources I used for Honduras
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/
http://www.cenrut.org/adw/over.htm