I had high hopes for geography at secondary school but dropped it at the first available opportunity.
As a small child I spent a lot of time memorising the atlas, not just the maps with the towns/rivers/capitals but also the pages that went before that about what countries exported what, what countries imported what, how the continents had changed over millions of years, the flora and fauna as well as the volcanoes stuff.
At school there was no teaching of the towns/cities/countries it was just about how volcanoes and tectonic plates worked. Which was far too boring for me.
If you know towns, cities and countries at the atlas level then it is knowledge learned by rote. If you find yourself living in a cosmopolitan city such as London where you meet people from all over the world then you can find this information useful. Even if you have never been there yourself you once knew a place well enough to remember the name so there is genuine interest in finding out what it is like to live there.
I wish they taught this geography of place names as a subject because it could be the one subject that kids who like memorising stuff could do well at.