North America has moved!?

Now I don’t want to alarm anyone, but north America has moved south…

I remember reading a book called “The Town That Went South” by Clive King when I was a kid, but could a whole country move south??

Having travelled around a bit I’ve encountered a few tourist information places, but none as unusual as the one I encountered crossing the border from Iran into Turkey.

On the road between Tabriz and the Iran – Turkey border we stopped at a petrol station to get cheap petrol before we hit Turkey where the fuel prices would rocket compared to Iran. The petrol station had a tourist information booth which was in the form of a huge globe of the world. This huge globe had a door in it, so presumably you could go inside or be served through it when it was occupied.

Judging by the sign nearby, it belonged to the “East Azerbaijan Cultural Heritage & Tourism Organisation”. Tabriz is in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province.

At first glance the map seemed to have all the continents, with a few oddly placed islands admittedly, but it looked OK. The countries were marked, but they were written in what looked like Arabic, so I’m assuming they were the countries.

Hang on minute… there is something not quite right here.

There was north America and below it what looked like south America… as you’d expect right!?

However, north America was labelled as “America Latin” and south America as “America Northern” !!

I was kind of glad this tourist information booth was closed as I’m not sure where we would have ended up if we’d needed directions to the border…