Field Notes
How I Get Around With No Data: My Offline Maps Setup
My eSIM connects the second I land. Most of the time. But “most of the time” is a funny phrase when you’re standing at a bus stop in the dark, in a town you can’t pronounce, and the little bars in the corner of the screen say nothing at all.
That happened to me in Laos. It happened again on a ferry in Indonesia, and once in the basement of a Tokyo train station, which is somehow worse. So now I don’t trust the signal. I trust the maps I downloaded the night before.
Here’s the whole setup. It takes about 15 minutes per country, on hotel Wi-Fi, and it’s free.
Google Maps, downloaded by area
This is the one everybody has. And it works offline.
Open Google Maps, tap your profile picture, then Offline maps, then Select your own map. Drag the box over the city or region you’re heading to. Download. A big city takes a few hundred megabytes.
What works offline:
- The map itself, with streets and place names
- Search for restaurants, hotels and shops in the area you downloaded
- Driving directions
What doesn’t work offline: walking, transit and cycling directions. That one surprised me. For someone who walks everywhere, it’s a big gap. I can still see the blue dot and follow the streets myself. I just don’t get the turn-by-turn.
One setting matters here. Under offline maps settings, turn on auto-update and set it to Wi-Fi only. Downloaded areas expire if they don’t update, and you’ll find out at the worst possible time.
Organic Maps, for walking
This is the app that fills the walking gap. Organic Maps is free, has no ads and runs on OpenStreetMap data. You download a whole country at once, and then everything works offline, including walking and cycling directions.
The OpenStreetMap data is often better than Google’s for the small stuff. Hiking trails. Footpaths between villages. The shortcut through a market that Google pretends isn’t there. In Luang Prabang, Organic Maps found me a footbridge across the river that Google didn’t show at all.
Where it’s weaker: business listings. It knows the streets better than it knows which café is still open. So I use the two together. Google to find the place, Organic Maps to walk there.
Apple Maps, if you’re on an iPhone
Apple added offline maps a couple of years ago, and they quietly got good. Search for a city, tap Download, done. The nice part is that Apple’s offline maps give you directions for walking and transit too, as well as driving.
I use it as the backup to the backup. If Organic Maps doesn’t have a good route and Google won’t give me walking directions, Apple usually will.
The rest of my offline kit
Maps get you to the door. These get you through it.
- Google Translate offline packs. Download the language before you go. Camera translation works offline too, which is how I read every menu in Hanoi.
- A screenshot of the hotel address in the local script. Taxi drivers can read it even when they can’t read my pronunciation. I keep it as my lock screen on arrival day.
- Offline copies of bookings. Boarding passes go in Apple Wallet. Hotel confirmations go in a folder in the Files app. Neither needs a signal to open.
My routine the night before
This is the whole habit. I do it on hotel Wi-Fi, usually in bed.
- Download the next city in Google Maps.
- Check that the country is downloaded in Organic Maps.
- Download the Translate pack if it’s a new language.
- Screenshot the next hotel’s address.
- Star the hotel, the bus station and one café near each in Google Maps.
That last step sounds small. But starred places show up offline, and when you step off a night bus at 5 a.m., the only thing you want is the nearest open café and the way to your bed.
What it costs
Nothing. All three apps are free. The only cost is storage: about 2GB on my phone for the countries I’m in this month. I delete each one when I leave.
So my eSIM still does almost all the work. But I haven’t been truly lost since Laos. And I’m not planning to be again.
— Leah
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