Looking at the sun did me in the first time I crossed the Tropic of Cancer near the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice. I am very used to using sun angle at different times of the day to find cardinal directions. That works very well where I usually live (45 degrees north latitude). But on a visit to Hong Kong, I kept going exactly in the reverse direction I "knew" I should go, and I finally figured out that near the end of June, at the latitude of Hong Kong, the sun was to my NORTH for the first time in my life, and looking at shadows or the sun angle kept reversing my sense of which way was north and which way was south.
As a separate issue during my first visit to Hong Kong, I found my American (and Taiwan) habit of assuming that road traffic drives on the right side of the road made me tend to look the wrong way most recently as I was about to cross streets. I almost got run over by a truck because of that. Habitual behavior is harder to correct than truly novel behavior.
P.S. The submitted article's advice on using wind direction (shown by movement of clouds) as a constant direction over short time spans works very badly here in the American Midwest. There are enough flagpoles in my neighborhood that I can readily observe wind direction as I walk or bike to do errands, and I've frequently seen radical changes in wind direction revealed either by flags near ground level or by clouds high in the sky in just a few hours.
> I kept going exactly in the reverse direction I "knew" I should go
I had exactly the same problem when moving from Australia to Japan, and it didn't go away after 4 years living there! I always wondered whether it was to do with the sun angle, or some other effect, as I seemed to suffer from it at night too. I wonder if there's been any studies of this kind of effect.
As a separate issue during my first visit to Hong Kong, I found my American (and Taiwan) habit of assuming that road traffic drives on the right side of the road made me tend to look the wrong way most recently as I was about to cross streets. I almost got run over by a truck because of that. Habitual behavior is harder to correct than truly novel behavior.
P.S. The submitted article's advice on using wind direction (shown by movement of clouds) as a constant direction over short time spans works very badly here in the American Midwest. There are enough flagpoles in my neighborhood that I can readily observe wind direction as I walk or bike to do errands, and I've frequently seen radical changes in wind direction revealed either by flags near ground level or by clouds high in the sky in just a few hours.