Vawn's Blog

Traveling with technology

VAWN HIMMELSBACH, Chic Savvy Travels

I’m escaping the noon-day heat in a little café in Taganga, a fishing village turned gringo hot spot on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Aside from organic coffee straight from the Sierra Nevada mountains, this café, like many others here, also has free Wi-Fi.

And that got me thinking about how technology has changed the way we travel. When I first started backpacking, there was no Facebook and no Twitter. Very few people traveled with a laptop. I’d drop into an Internet café every now and then to let friends and family know I was still alive or to finish any freelance assignments coming due.

Nowadays, many backpackers travel with a laptop or netbook, and many more have a phone (or two). A few nights ago, I stayed in a nine-person dorm in Cartagena with only four lockers – which turned out to be a problem, because many of us were traveling with a laptop. One guy spent half the night sprawled across his dorm bed BBM’ing on his BlackBerry (and then later, to the dismay of the girls in the dorm, got naked – but that’s a topic for another blog).

I remember traveling in Myanmar several years ago – at the time, it was near impossible to find an Internet café, and email was monitored by the ruling militia junta, so I was completely incommunicato with the outside world for about a month. The same thing happened in Tibet, where my Yahoo account suddenly didn’t work for six weeks after I mentioned the Dalai Lama in an email. But being cut off was, in a way, actually quite liberating.

When I travel, I like to escape technology, but I also realize it gives me the freedom to travel, since I can work from pretty much anywhere in the world, so long as I have an Internet connection. One guy I met told me about a cool app he has on his iPhone, called iSpeak, that he uses to translate English into Spanish. And many backpackers I’ve met here book all their hotels and transportation in advance, from the comfort of their personal electronic devices.

So I’m torn. There are certainly benefits to technology (I’m typing this on my netbook right now), but quite frankly, I’d rather be lying on a beach, hiking to a waterfall or exploring a colonial town than sitting in front of my computer looking at hostelworld.com.

Technology has its place, but personally, I try to limit its use when traveling, and I prefer not to book anything in advance. Tonight, for example, I was planning to hop on a night bus to San Gil, but it’s a perfect day here in Taganga and the beach is practically empty. So I think I’ll just stay another day and figure out tomorrow, tomorrow.

In the coming weeks, I’ll have much more to write about Colombia. But in the meantime, it’s time for me to get back to the beach and do absolutely nothing…
Vawn

Date Added: March 14, 2011 | Comments (1)

1 Comment »

Couldn’t agree with you more, Vawn. I was surprised how well we were all connected when I was in India. And climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro? Wifi and mobile reception! It’s a catch 22 – its great to be connected, but don’t we travel to these far away places to be “unconnected”?…

Comment by Tamara — March 26, 2011 @ 10:25 am