Tag Archives: travel

Travel Tips

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The wife and I have been travelling for the past year or so on a fourteen month trip around the world. I was just reading Nat Friedman’s travel tips so I was inspired to add a few of my own more back-packer-y tips.

  1. For long trips use small bags within your luggage. We used Eagle Creek Pack-It Cubes. It makes it so much easier to keep your luggage organized as you move about. Repacking becomes a 30 second effort.
  2. For power bring a single adapter (I’ve been using a universal adapter similar to this one) and then a multi-adapter from your home country. I picked up a tiny triple adapter like this one. That way I can charge two computers and a phone with a single (often scarce) wall outlet and a single adapter.
  3. An unlocked GSM phone plus a cheap local SIM card is really handy if you’re going to be in  a country for more than a week or so. You can buy a low-end Nokia that can still browse the web (poorly, but enough to check your email) for about US$30. We put our temporary numbers on Facebook so that friends and family could call us, but mostly we needed phones to call ahead to hostels and locals. Also, if you’re used to paying for phone service in North America you’ll be pleasantly amazed by how cheap it is in much of the world.
  4. If you have to pay for wifi, but have two computers then an ethernet cable plus internet sharing halves your costs. NetworkManager does the internet sharing stuff trivially, I’ve rarely gotten it to work through Windows and MacOS though.
  5. AirCrack-NG is your friend. Learn its quirks. Use it wisely. The documentation that comes in the Debian / Ubuntu package probably isn’t quite enough to get it working so you should practice somewhere where you already have access to the Internet.
  6. A travel clothesline can be invaluable in extending the length of your wardrobe. Pick up some hand laundry soap and you’ll be able to wash shirts, socks and underwear pretty easily. We found larger things like jeans harder to wash in hostel sinks, but if you can visit a laundromat a couple of time a month and wash the rest of your stuff a couple of times a week in your hotel or hostel you’ll have more time and money for fun while not turning into a completely stinky hippie.

Social media in the Sahara desert

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My wife and I just finished a week long camel trek in eastern Morocco with Berber nomads. While our hosts had no formal education, no running water, no grid electricity (just a little solar), no flush toilets and no floors in their homes, no land lines and no computers they did have mobile phones. Pretty much everyone seemed to have a low end (Series 40) Nokia. Their lack of education didn’t stop them texting madly. Perhaps more interesting was that they used their mobiles both as music players and for playing what we’d call viral videos. I’m not sure how they get content on their phones, probably an hour away at the super cheap internet cafes of Rissani. At Danger one of the key ideas that differentiated us from the Blackberry and later iPhone was that we were a standalone appliance, not a peripheral for your existing computer. We’ve seen some failure in this model recently but I think it’s ultimately a worthy goal.