I can do 40-hour train rides across India. I will share a bed in Marseille with a dreadlocked, horny French boy (long story). I don’t mind riding sampans down a river in Borneo at dawn, with only two hungover boatmen and a torchlight guiding us. I’ll let myself be stuck in middle of bloody nowhere, be it struggling with peanut butter toast in rural Java, interviewing leprosy patients in Nilphamari, or get on 40-something hour train rides across India to go crawl through a coal mine (and find out how it doesn’t rain but pours in the world’s wettest place during the monsoon). So. With the line of ‘work’ I’ve found myself in, the lack of luxury and the certainty of discomfort are things I live with.
Things I can live without: hot water, a comfortable bed (or the idea of a bed, sometimes), air-conditioning, the idea of cellular coverage, not being able to speak English for weeks, even the internet (for about 3 days).
But there are some things I can’t live without; things I won’t leave home without. People have often asked me what kind of gear I use – and it’s a difficult question to answer. It’s not so much about which tool lets me do what; rather it is which combination of things lets me travel and connect the way I want to. While this list is exhaustive (and often fickle), these are my current five must-haves while I’m on the road. That road being Bombay, Yemen, London, Aleppo, Antalya, Bangkok or wherever the next big idea takes me to. (Next week: Sana’a and Shibam Hadhramout!)
Extend, adapt everything
This may sound like common sense to those of us who travel extensively, so skip this bit if you’re one of them. But I’ve seen novice travellers who struggle with four different adaptors while crouching over the power point in a dingy backpackers room trying to figure out if the voltage in this country will fry her precious iPhone. My solution: always take ONE international adaptor and a multiplug outlet that will host your appliances from home. That way, you will never need more than one adaptor to keep all your toys recharged and running. You also make more friends that way — try being the only one in a room of 8 people who has a multi-point to charge everyone’s appliances! Even better, take one with a longish extension cord. Because Murphy’s Law in travelling says, “There will be no power outlet. If there is one, it will be horrendously far away.” You don’t want your iPhone dangling halfway off a wall, do you?
Monster storage in micro spaces
Photographs and videos and everything else I shoot. Music to keep me sane. All absolutely necessary, but all greedy, possessive culprits when it comes to storage space. While I’d like to lug my 1TB hard disk everywhere I go, 2 extra kilos makes quite a dent in a 65-litre backpack, especially when said backpack contains your life’s belongings, like it does in my case. So it’s back to basics for me — flash drives. My favourite ones? My stack of Sandisk Extreme Cruzer Contours, 16GB each. I’ve got one just for my photos. Another one holds my Ubuntu Linux distribution so I can use it as a “live” disk, or have install files handy, whenever I need it. On the road, it’s perfect for me: quick, durable, and without those nonsense caps which will get lost. Thousands of photos, videos, and — here’s when you know I’m such a girl — it looks really good. Likewise, as a professional photographer I keep a bunch of high capacity CF cards on hand all the time. At the moment what does it for me is the Extreme IV 8GB and 16GB cards, coupled with their high speed card readers.
Compact connectivity
Again, another small wonder. When netbooks first came out, I knew I’d be needing one. And I went to Taiwan to bring one home with me. Now everybody at home home and has a netbook each; some of them Eee PCs, but there might be more HP Minis soon, again, because I got one. One can’t have too many laptops — so while I have my Macbook as my main machine, and my tiny Eee PC for… when I feel like typing into very small keys (I have the very first one with the tiny screen!), my HP Mini is now my preferred travelling companion. I twitter (excessively, as you know), blog, and email on the go, and run half of fortylove.tv from this thing. My dad, who has never had much luck with computers, liked it so much he stole it from me when I went home recently, and now I’m scheming to get my hands on another one.
A cheap way to call home
Being in a long-distance relationship, and living away from home as well, this means that I’m quite the expert with VOIP. I’ve tried them all: calling cards from Mustafa Center, old favourites like Skype, dodgy websites which involve small ATM deposits and creating fake Eastern European surnames to activate my account. Jajah.com was my favourite for a while until it locked me out with its stupid interface. My current favourite, however, is Starhub’s callback service, Bounce, part of pfingo, which I’ve already been using to make free outgoing calls back home to Singapore. Why don’t I just talk through SkypeOut, you ask? Because I now live in a country (i.e. the United Arab Emirates) that bans Skype, and while SkypeOut technically could work if you already had the app installed, the insanely slow connection speeds in Dubai also mean that she can never hear me. While internet telephony isn’t new, callback services have, in my experience, offered clearer connections and it allows for the luxury of talking with your mobile phone rather than into a computer. (This helps: every time I make a call, I am usually rolling about in bed.) What I think it does is: when I trigger the call through the interface, it calls me back — so I get free incoming — and it routes my call to her, or back home. I really hate shouting into my laptop while people are staring at me, and this is how I talk to my Ah-Ma almost daily without her ever having to understand the intricacies of the Web. So Bounce is how I’m talkin’, mostly, these days.
Local SIM cards
If you look into my bag, you’re going to be shocked at the number of SIM cards I have. I have prepaid SIM cards from Malaysia, Thailand, different states in India, France, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Turkey, Yemen, etc. I’ve found local SIM cards indispensable. I NEVER use roaming — it’s just stupid to pay that much money for it. When I’m in Istanbul, if my Turkish friends decide we should have a meyhandi dinner in Nevizade Sokak, if I didn’t have a local SIM I would NEVER find it. Cannot do without it. Most SIM cards expire within a month or two, but if you plan to be in a country long enough then think about saving money by buying longer-validity cards. I’ve had my Malaysian SIM for a long time, but because I’ll soon be moving there, I’ve got a Maxis year-long prepaid subscription.
So, travellers — what are the other things you can’t do without?
possibly related
Home /
Take Home Lessons /
Staying in Touch /
Alpha and Omega /
Fortylove.tv is Rolling /
Five things I won’t leave home without
I can do 40-hour train rides across India. I will share a bed in Marseille with a dreadlocked, horny French boy (long story). I don’t mind riding sampans down a river in Borneo at dawn, with only two hungover boatmen and a torchlight guiding us. I’ll let myself be stuck in middle of bloody nowhere, be it struggling with peanut butter toast in rural Java, interviewing leprosy patients in Nilphamari, or get on 40-something hour train rides across India to go crawl through a coal mine (and find out how it doesn’t rain but pours in the world’s wettest place during the monsoon). So. With the line of ‘work’ I’ve found myself in, the lack of luxury and the certainty of discomfort are things I live with.
Things I can live without: hot water, a comfortable bed (or the idea of a bed, sometimes), air-conditioning, the idea of cellular coverage, not being able to speak English for weeks, even the internet (for about 3 days).
But there are some things I can’t live without; things I won’t leave home without. People have often asked me what kind of gear I use – and it’s a difficult question to answer. It’s not so much about which tool lets me do what; rather it is which combination of things lets me travel and connect the way I want to. While this list is exhaustive (and often fickle), these are my current five must-haves while I’m on the road. That road being Bombay, Yemen, London, Aleppo, Antalya, Bangkok or wherever the next big idea takes me to. (Next week: Sana’a and Shibam Hadhramout!)
Extend, adapt everything
This may sound like common sense to those of us who travel extensively, so skip this bit if you’re one of them. But I’ve seen novice travellers who struggle with four different adaptors while crouching over the power point in a dingy backpackers room trying to figure out if the voltage in this country will fry her precious iPhone. My solution: always take ONE international adaptor and a multiplug outlet that will host your appliances from home. That way, you will never need more than one adaptor to keep all your toys recharged and running. You also make more friends that way — try being the only one in a room of 8 people who has a multi-point to charge everyone’s appliances! Even better, take one with a longish extension cord. Because Murphy’s Law in travelling says, “There will be no power outlet. If there is one, it will be horrendously far away.” You don’t want your iPhone dangling halfway off a wall, do you?
Monster storage in micro spaces
Photographs and videos and everything else I shoot. Music to keep me sane. All absolutely necessary, but all greedy, possessive culprits when it comes to storage space. While I’d like to lug my 1TB hard disk everywhere I go, 2 extra kilos makes quite a dent in a 65-litre backpack, especially when said backpack contains your life’s belongings, like it does in my case. So it’s back to basics for me — flash drives. My favourite ones? My stack of Sandisk Extreme Cruzer Contours, 16GB each. I’ve got one just for my photos. Another one holds my Ubuntu Linux distribution so I can use it as a “live” disk, or have install files handy, whenever I need it. On the road, it’s perfect for me: quick, durable, and without those nonsense caps which will get lost. Thousands of photos, videos, and — here’s when you know I’m such a girl — it looks really good. Likewise, as a professional photographer I keep a bunch of high capacity CF cards on hand all the time. At the moment what does it for me is the Extreme IV 8GB and 16GB cards, coupled with their high speed card readers.
Compact connectivity
Again, another small wonder. When netbooks first came out, I knew I’d be needing one. And I went to Taiwan to bring one home with me. Now everybody at home home and has a netbook each; some of them Eee PCs, but there might be more HP Minis soon, again, because I got one. One can’t have too many laptops — so while I have my Macbook as my main machine, and my tiny Eee PC for… when I feel like typing into very small keys (I have the very first one with the tiny screen!), my HP Mini is now my preferred travelling companion. I twitter (excessively, as you know), blog, and email on the go, and run half of fortylove.tv from this thing. My dad, who has never had much luck with computers, liked it so much he stole it from me when I went home recently, and now I’m scheming to get my hands on another one.
A cheap way to call home
Being in a long-distance relationship, and living away from home as well, this means that I’m quite the expert with VOIP. I’ve tried them all: calling cards from Mustafa Center, old favourites like Skype, dodgy websites which involve small ATM deposits and creating fake Eastern European surnames to activate my account. Jajah.com was my favourite for a while until it locked me out with its stupid interface. My current favourite, however, is Starhub’s callback service, Bounce, part of pfingo, which I’ve already been using to make free outgoing calls back home to Singapore. Why don’t I just talk through SkypeOut, you ask? Because I now live in a country (i.e. the United Arab Emirates) that bans Skype, and while SkypeOut technically could work if you already had the app installed, the insanely slow connection speeds in Dubai also mean that she can never hear me. While internet telephony isn’t new, callback services have, in my experience, offered clearer connections and it allows for the luxury of talking with your mobile phone rather than into a computer. (This helps: every time I make a call, I am usually rolling about in bed.) What I think it does is: when I trigger the call through the interface, it calls me back — so I get free incoming — and it routes my call to her, or back home. I really hate shouting into my laptop while people are staring at me, and this is how I talk to my Ah-Ma almost daily without her ever having to understand the intricacies of the Web. So Bounce is how I’m talkin’, mostly, these days.
Local SIM cards
If you look into my bag, you’re going to be shocked at the number of SIM cards I have. I have prepaid SIM cards from Malaysia, Thailand, different states in India, France, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Turkey, Yemen, etc. I’ve found local SIM cards indispensable. I NEVER use roaming — it’s just stupid to pay that much money for it. When I’m in Istanbul, if my Turkish friends decide we should have a meyhandi dinner in Nevizade Sokak, if I didn’t have a local SIM I would NEVER find it. Cannot do without it. Most SIM cards expire within a month or two, but if you plan to be in a country long enough then think about saving money by buying longer-validity cards. I’ve had my Malaysian SIM for a long time, but because I’ll soon be moving there, I’ve got a Maxis year-long prepaid subscription.
So, travellers — what are the other things you can’t do without?
possibly related
Home / Take Home Lessons / Staying in Touch / Alpha and Omega / Fortylove.tv is Rolling /