Techno Travel

This trip has really demonstrated to me the prevalence of mobile technology. The first people I met in the Moscow hostel were a British couple waiting for some visas to come through. She was tapping away at a laptop and he at his smartphone. They explained that their choice of hostel was partly as they knew this once had reliable Wifi.

I hadn't really thought about this, and was planning to leave my Blackberry at home to avoid racking up a huge bill. But what you have to do, the man explained, is to switch off the mobile data function and connect using the wireless function, wherever there is a wireless network. This is basically free, and you can send and receive emails and do some limited browsing of the web for nothing using your own device.

I've done this a lot. For example, I'm writing this on a train in the middle of Mongolia, and when I get to somewhere in Beijing that has WiFi, probably the hostel, it will automatically be uploaded to the blog via email.

Someone asked me before I left if I was taking a laptop. It seemed like a silly idea to me to take a computer backpacking. But I would say about half the people I've met are travelling with a laptop, usually a nice small one of some kind. All they need is WiFi and they have all the functionality they would have at home - for nothing. Most people have some kind of smartphone if not a laptop. Typically all the sockets in the dorms will be full overnight with devices charging up. I feel less worried about theft when I can see that everyone else has better gear than I do.

To think that when I first went abroad, we used to write letters home and put them in the post. When I told my student friend in Omsk, Alexandra, that I was planning to send some postcards, she looked horrified and said "That's gonna take, like, a MONTH!" (I sent them anyway). On our Gobi trip the Dutch couple had to return early because of an eye accident (he's okay now). Within an hour of arriving back at the hostel after the trip, most of the group had already found each other on Facebook, exchanged emails and stories, and arranged to meet up for dinner.

Internet cafes start to seem like more trouble than they are worth when you can simply get a wireless router and everyone will visit your cafe to use their own devices. You can take advantage of open wireless networks also. In Listvyanka, some British students were staying at the same hostel as me. We ended up in the same place for dinner, and on the way back one of them detected a WiFi network in a hotel we were walking past. Within seconds he was having a face-to-face conversation with his girlfriend back home - for free using Skype. I'm probably behind the times, but I think that's pretty amazing.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device