Having stayed in Pretoria for over ten years, I thought it would be interesting to make my children aware of some of the military history of the city going back to the time of the Anglo-Boer War. I tried to find the exact location of the four famous forts in Pretoria and then use the GPS feature on an Android phone to go and find the places. The fourth fort, Fort Daspoortrand gave me the most problems when I had to repeatedly cross the N4 Bakwena Highway trying to find my way through Gerotek, PMP and all the military fences in the area.
When you "star" a place in Google maps, Google tries to locate the place closest to the nearest registered road. As such it moves your place from where you have marked it.
I tried to put in a place marker for Fort Daspoortrant at-25.73305 ,
28.076740 which is near the mountain north of Lotus Gardens. The "Maps" application on an HTC phone (Wildfire) seems to
pick up the place marker without problems, but google maps via Firefox running on a
Linux Ubuntu machine ignores the heading of the bookmark (Fort
Daspoortrant) and locates the old Boer Fort on the Montana side of the
Waterberg mountain! It then associates the Fort with Zander Street. This is a sure
way to confuse anyone relying on an accurate place-mark to find the old
Fort.
If you try and report the problem to Google, it is almost worse than trying to report an electricity problem to the Tshwane municipality: you are sent from site to site without ever finding a suitable place to report the error.
A good wikipedia article about the forts can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretoria_Forts
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