Tim Leffel's Cheapest Destinations

I’m Changing My Tune on Traveling with Laptops

I’ve been saying since the dawn of laptops that traveling with one is a pain in the rear. I should know, I’ve been carrying one since the dawn of laptops and every time I am able to go on vacation without one it’s like someone has removed a giant boulder from my back. Not just from the literal weight, but from the weight of being connected to home the whole time. As I and many other frequent travelers have discovered, you have a much richer experience when you unplug while traveling.

But two recent developments have softened my time-hardened stance. First of all, truly portable laptops are getting cheaper. I only paid $782 with shipping for my fully loaded 13-inch HP dv3 laptop with ridiculously sick specs and features. A year or two ago you had to pay two grand and up for something this small and powerful.

But if you’re just surfing the web and uploading photos, you don’t need that kind of power of course. So in come the game-changers: Netbooks. These little guys (like the Acer Aspire One) are going for $400 or less, sometimes way less. They’re getting so cheap that some wireless phone companies are  even giving them away free with a signed data contract. They have their limitations, but they’re light, have a long battery life, and if someone steals it you’re not out much money. Just be sure to take a portable hard drive or at least a USB thumb drive with lots of memory to back up your photos and key data.

The other game-changer is a result of these cheaper laptops: fewer Internet cafes all the time in some countries. Here’s  a note from Leif Pettersen’s Killing Batteries blog on what’s happening in Romania.

“Unfortunately, Romania embracing wi-fi so heartily has led to the quick death of internet cafes everywhere. Only the biggest cities still seem to have them, but who knows for how long? I fear that soon people traveling without wi-fi equipped devices are going to be completely screwed.”

Fortunately the situation is not so dire in areas that are further behind the curve. You can’t walk a block in most of Latin America without seeing an Internet cafe or two and they’re still plentiful in Asia and elsewhere, in countries where it’s a major dent in the budget to buy even a netbook, never mind the monthly broadband connection. But this won’t last forever.

You can avoid carrying any kind of laptop by packing an iPhone or other surfing smart phone (or the iPod Touch), but beware. Unless you’re using an unlocked one and switching out the SIM card, you could spend more on data and voice charges overseas than you do on the whole rest of your trip. See this post: Your cellphone + travel = big bucks.

One last advantage if you have your own surfing device of some kind: Skype. This service is a godsend. You can get an unlimited calling subscription for your home country and chat away as long as you need to from wherever you have a connection. You can purchase a number with your home area code for cheap and people can leave you voice mails there without calling an overseas number. But just because it’s there doesn’t mean you should use it all the time: the electronic leash comes with a choker chain.

The real question is, how much willpower do you have? Can you immerse yourself in a foreign culture completely, leaving the gadgets turned off, then just go online once in a while to check in? Or will you just port your Facebook and Twitter habits from here to a foreign land and cut yourself off from what’s around you?

Electronic gadgets enable communication, but they are also isolation devices. Use them too much and you miss out on the whole reason you left home to start with: discovery of a new place and its people with all senses fully open and operating.