sabinati wrote:you're in the jungle, baby
You're gonna diiiiiiiieee!! <guitar>

For some serious help on using that world map, get the Ender client (or pretty much any of the 3rd party clients). They save the maps you've found and cache them to disk. After you've explored a good bit in one session and found some identifying terrain (a lake with a mountain next to it, pink and yellow grasslands together, etc), you can go to where you have your client stored, open up the map subfolder, and inside is a web page called map. Open it and you can then try to compare instead of just doing it from memory.
Word of warning: any time you log out, enter a house or cave, or teleport, it starts a new session (for technical reasons, this is necessary), so if you're going to explore to find your place in the world, try to do it all at once.
Opinions expressed in this statement are the authors alone and in no way reflect on the game development values of the actual developers.