Madagascar

There's no Google Car coverage here — everything was shot by trekker (on-foot capture), or from a boat or an ox. Coverage is also limited to a handful of places, so once you've memorised all of them you can identify this instantly.

Rice is the staple food, and the countryside often looks similar to rural Asia.

Roadside utility poles of the same shape as mainland France's turn up here.

If you see baobabs — a thick, barrel-like trunk topped with short spreading branches — standing on flat, dry ground, you're in the west. The surrounding trees shed their leaves in the dry season, giving the landscape a brownish look. The Avenue of the Baobabs near Morondava is the famous example.

If you see whitish or red sand with slender, spiny trunks rising like octopus legs, or dense succulents, that's the spiny forest of the southwest. It's visible in coverage along the coast north of Toliara, around Velondriake.

Rolling, largely treeless grassy hills, with terraced rice paddies stepping down valley floors and slopes, mean the central highlands. Bare red-earth slopes appear here and there too. This is the landscape around Antananarivo.