I bought my SO the cheapest little GPS (American) a couple of years ago - cost just over £100. Can't remember the make, might be Garmin, but it's yellow and about the size of a mobile phone. He makes good use of it, working in forrin' parts as he does. Especially last year when he took a boat up the Yangtze for 3 days and was the only non-Chinese speaker aboard. He used the GPS along with a map and could see exactly where he was and which villages he was passing.

He's off into the mountains of Kyrghyzstan for a week's walking in a few days time, and it will go along with him. It has that useful little facility of recording the trail you've walked so that you don't get lost. (This has also come in handy, he says, when on the way back from pubs in unfamiliar districts of Shenyang!)

When you switch it on after his return to the UK from Asia, you can almost hear it thinking hard for a few minutes as it tries to find its satellites. Then it asks, "have you moved more than 100 miles?"

Andrea