You’re far away. But this is the twenty-teens and that means there’s a wealth of fantastically easy ways to keep in touch with those loved ones you left behind. This will help you make the most of your avenues for communication.
Believe it or not, this is no longer the most prevalent way to keep in touch over the Internet, but since we’re a nostalgic bunch at AirTreks, we’ll start here. Yes, you can use email to update your peeps back home. Make sure to have a free online email service like Yahoo or Gmail so you can access it anywhere.
Internet Cafés
Almost every major city in the world now has Internet cafés spread across their geography. This comes as a relief to those travelers who need to communicate, do research or make arrangements further along in their trip but don’t have their own computer with which to do so.
Internet cafés can come as a godsend with per hour prices ranging from super cheap to crazy cheap depending on where in the world you are.
Typically there are attendants lounging around inside the establishment to pay for a terminal or else they’ll be at an adjacent café or restaurant with a cash register.
New Mosque, Istanbul by ncrisafulli
There are however inherent risks that come with using random Internet cafés in cities, namely identity theft. Here are a few things you can do to protect yourself:
- Using a respectable connection: a hotel business center, corporate franchise (like FedEx) or a friend’s house.
- If you must use the public option, after you’re finished be sure to delete the history and any cookies (personal info the browser saves automatically) and sign out of every sensitive site you log into.
- Avoid visiting financial institution websites (banks, credit unions, credit cards, etc). Some hackers install keystroke readers that can copy passwords from remote locations.
- Avoid making credit card transactions if possible.
- If you have to do the above two things, read this important article on how to keep you accounts safe at internet cafes by Fox Nomad.
Bringing your own computer
The new hot topic is to go a-flashpacking (aka, traveling with technology). Given pop culture’s many new tech-heavy habits the trend isn’t surprising. It does however let you travel with all those internet-age sensibilities you’ve managed to adopt over the past half-decade.
With international Wi-Fi popping up everywhere, the idea resonates firmly with the traveling community. Booking upcoming travel arrangements, researching, blogging from the road, processing your photos from your hotel/hostel bed, sharing music with fellow travelers at a café table, are all now par for the course inside or outside the technorati multitude.
These opportunities are supported by the popularity of the netbook computer. Essentially pint-size laptops, netbooks are lighter, cheaper, less flashy but extremely portable and often still quite powerful machines. Billed as the traveler’s laptop, netbooks are more aligned to the modern traveler’s needs—they’re small, usually offering 7″ – 10″ screens with diminutive keyboards and designed to free up space by offering the no-frills approach to internet computing, limiting the functionality to only what’s absolutely necessary. Netbooks allow for internet access via Wi-Fi if it’s available and give a slew of digital storage solutions. Netbooks are perfect for web browsing, word-processing and other general purpose applications. The size also keeps it out of the prying eyes of predators while freeing up your luggage for other more traditional traveling items—like clothing.
There’s a wealth of netbooks currently on the market, one for any approach to on-the-road computing . If you’re interested in picking one up for your coming trip here’s a website with a great list of popular and powerful netbook options for you to compare. The best part, you can often get one of these suckers for less than $500. Note that this technology evolves at the speed of light. Try not to take it out on AirTreks if the info here is a little behind.
And don’t forget the iPad.
Social Media
Bigger than email, bigger than face-to-face communication, nearly bigger than the Internet inside which it lives, social media is making mince-meat of how we thought we’d be communicating in the modern age. And it’s allowing us to be gone, but not really gone, from our social circle if we don’t want to be.
Here are a few social media-friendly ways to communicate with those that know and love us (and a few that don’t) while you’re gone:
- Facebook – just update your status once in a while and it’ll be like you never left
- Twitter – keep it short and you’ll be sharing tidbits, photos, even video to people that know you (and more that don’t!)
- Blogging – start yourself a blog and give people all of your experiences they could ever want.
Snail Mail
How early 90s of you to want to hand-write somebody. If you’re the kind to hold a sense of nostalgia for pen and paper there’s still options for sending mail. See any travel article written since 1850. Any hotel will be more than happy to send off your letter whether or not you’re staying there. Gift shops, posts and tourist stores still have stamps.
Telephone
The subject of travel phones is nebulous and ever-changing. It’s a mystifying business of specs and industry-speak that will leave you craving just one voice to tell you what to do. Unfortunately, since we’re just a simple travel agency, we’re not that voice. Fortunately there are others to turn to. For hints on what handset to look to, check out the Travel Insider’s nine part series on travel phones. Or if that gives you a headache, read Nile Guide’s simply laid out guide.
Skype
Skype is an international internet phone service that lets you speak with long lost contemporaries from their website at no charge to you. For a time your calling party had to be online as well but more recently Skype has expanded their service to let you call land and mobile phones too, but for a fee (usually .02 – .20 cents a minute). All you need is a reliable (and reasonably fast) internet connection and you’re off and chatting. Most Wi-Fi enabled smart phones now allow access to Skype as well. So once you find a hotspot you can converse all you like!
