If you zoom out and look at the water channels in Guyana you'll see why. Basically there's miles and miles of rice and sugar cane fields. They're all rectangles with ditches surrounding them and canals here and there feeding them. It seems basically once in a while the govt. acquires a large tract of land and proposes a "housing scheme". It gets divided up into lots and they sell them off cheap. So every block has a ditch around it, most houses have a small bridge to the front door and villages are boundaried by waterways.

Once I figured that out the whole naming scheme and numbering scheme started to make lots of sense. Unfortunately many of the housing schemes don't have street names so someone may say they live at "Lot 275 Diamond" and you have to go around asking for directions the whole time. Usually you call someone on the cellphone as you start to get to their area.

Look here (osm.org/?lat=6.75321&lon=-58.17252&zoom=15&layers=M) the lots are the same size as the nearby blocks. I could spend years tracing just the waterways. :)

Hey that's neat, I didn't notice the new shortcode link feature. I've been outta OSM too long. ;-)

I'm not sure I understand your question. Openstreetmap is 100x better than both Google Maps and Microsoft Maps in the Georgetown area. They have more cities marked in the interior than OSM, but that's only because I haven't been there yet. ;)

Seems I should use either loc_name or reg_name for this. I'm trying to wrap my head around the difference between regional and local names. Hrrrmmmmm...

Well I did a bit today and made my first upload. Took me a while to find the waypoints importer for JOSM, once I had that it started moving along. Tags took forever at first, then I started getting up to speed. Added some bus stops, lots of fast food, public restrooms, parks, that sort of thing. Then finally made my upload. Strangely it had several nodes marked as modified. Uh oh. Maybe I nudged some around a little, hope nothing stupid. It seems like when you make for example the main data layer invisible you're still able to select nodes in it until you manually select the other layers. Perhaps that's where all the edits came from when I was trying to figure out why I couldn't select my waypoints after I made main data layer invisible. Too bad it doesn't auto select the next lower layer when you make one invisible.

Still it was overall bearable. ;)

Thanks for the tips guys.