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When I first logged in to Google Earth, I felt liberated from gravity, space, and time—unmoored from the planet and allowed to soar, like a great bird, and discover the world’s mysterious grandeur. I could go anywhere from my computer. And where, unfettered at last, did I travel first? To the tar roof of my own building. I had no idea there were so many air-conditioning units up there. Is that my clothesline in the back? Are those my socks? The irony was at my own expense. Google Earth is positively pregnant with potential for travelers. And yet my first impulse—yours, too, I bet—was to examine the contours of my own living space, in case the view from above was more than tar. The temptation is deep to explore what you already know, as if an undiscovered screen image were just as harrowing and foreboding as an undiscovered country. But professional travelers have begun exploiting Google Earth, both to find new sites for exploration and to enrich their knowledge of places they’ve already visited. Nathaniel Waring, president of the high-end tour outfit Cox & Kings, scouts potential adventure-tour locations by prowling Google Earth obsessively. Scouring coastlines for surfing destinations, for example, he points out the wispily serrated shore of Scorpion Bay, in Baja California. The wisps suggest “a very good point break,” he says, something no atlas can convey.

At the end of last year, he zoomed in deep to follow Colombia’s northern Pacific rim—an undeveloped coastline plagued by armed rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. From Bahia Solano, a mud-road settlement served weekly by commercial airlines, the coast stretches about 100 miles to Panama through virgin territory. Jungle reaches all the way to the sea, unwinnowed by aggressive logging or human settlement. Waring visited in September 2007 and found the coast as unspoiled as he had hoped. On Google Earth, Bahia Solano itself is a brown, blurry smudge at the mouth of a meandering river, with a small but still discernible grid of streets.

Waring looks for a combination of what Google Earth can see and what Google Earth cannot see. The orderly streets mean a developed town. But the messy green blur of the coastline means precisely the kind of fresh geography that makes travel an adventure. To find a frothy fringe of waves in an area so remote that Google (or, more precisely, the commercial satellites on which it relies) hadn’t bothered to map it was to discover a new place that even today would qualify as what Joseph Conrad called “the blankest of blank spaces on the Earth’s figured surface.” Near Bahia Solano there are, Waring confirmed, some of the great surfing sites of South America, and the area will be a hell of a trip for surfers, ecologists, and whale-watchers, once he can figure out how to keep the rebels from kidnapping his clients.

Other tour operators have used Google Earth more modestly. Steve Filipiak, director of Internet marketing at Abercrombie & Kent, says his company’s tours to Africa have profited from examination with Google Earth’s bird’s-eye perspective. While preparing a safari in Zambia, for example, Filipiak might notice a clearing and suggest that their local experts go there and assess it. “Often,” he says, “they’re surprised by what we can find from a computer thousands of miles away.” A&K also offers a Google Earth tour for its clients, so they can preview their itinerary and bounce from campsite to campsite before leaving home.

I mapped out a trip of my own on Google Earth. I wasn’t quite ready to trust the program to help me stalk rhinos or hang ten with the FARC, but I could imagine a short driving tour through the Mojave Desert. In Las Vegas, I watched my preview: a long straight shot up through the desert into Beatty, then to Goldfield, followed by a crossing of the Inyos and a drive back through Death Valley. A combination of nuclear testing and harsh climate has made these areas as remote and inhospitable as anyplace I was likely to find in the continental United States. The desert is also so bleak and empty, I felt, that if Google Earth could provide reasons to stop and study its vast and undifferentiated still life more carefully, then it would have earned its keep by that alone. From my Vegas hotel room, I looked for sites of interest along the way, most of them user-generated pins that marked curiosities on the roadside. There were many—brothels, scattered mining settlements, ghost towns, government sites where military scientists detonated bombs and probed aliens.