carry
on, regardless
New York TImes
April 29, 1999
A Home Page Away From Home
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Techno-nomads Use Web and E-Mail to Stay Connected as They Wander By SANA SIWOLOP
Kristina Johnson and David Franke are
circumnavigating the world, taking in sights as remote as the glaciers of New Zealand and
the mountains of Nepal. But don't assume that this couple have dropped off the map.
http://www.photogypsy.com/
Photogypsy.com chronicles the travels of Almitra
the "photogypsy."
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On the contrary. Click on the Web site
www.wired2theworld.com that Franke and Ms. Johnson lovingly maintain, and you'll see a
smorgasbord of trip details.
The site is crammed with dozens of pictures, a
pretrip journal, Ms. Johnson's global recipe collection, links to almost 30 related travel
sites and a spot for sending e-mail to the travelers. The couple, who are married, are
also using the Internet to stay in touch with some two dozen family members and friends,
as well as to give advice to travelers who ask.
They manage all their finances online, using
tools like Citibank's online banking service and the online stock trading that is offered
by Charles Schwab.
Call it dharma bums go digital, even though they
seem a far cry from what Jack Kerouac had in mind when he described his wanderings in
search of spiritual truth in his 1958 novel "Dharma Bums."
Just a few years ago, extended trips abroad
usually meant that travelers would disappear, surfacing occasionally only through
hideously expensive phone calls or rumpled airmail envelopes bearing ancient postmarks.
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Related Article Technical Advice Is Easy to Find When the Road Beckons (April 29, 1999)
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But now a new breed of techno-nomad is taking to
the road. These travelers are fortifying themselves with things like laptops, personal
digital assistants, telephone adapter kits, digital cameras, photo-editing software and
Web-design tools. They're using the Net not just to take care of pesky daily matters --
like paying credit card bills -- but also to trade tips with fellow travelers on the road,
scout out resources in countries to be visited and post online travelogues.
The Web site that carries the Round-the-World
Travel Guide, www.travel-library.com/rtw/html, for example, posts nearly 100 travelogues
for trips that are either in the works or already completed.
Many travelers may find the idea of tethering
themselves to cyberspace while they are taking in faraway places downright odd. After all,
much of the charm of travel is the chance to throw off the chains of daily life. Why
bother taking in the exotic aura of, say, a camel fair in Pushkar, India, if you're busy
worrying whether your errant relatives have turned your home into Party Central? Or
whether your former employer now lists you as "deceased"?
Many techno-nomads do, in fact, try to strike a
balance when they're on the road so their cyberspace travels do not overwhelm their real
ones. And they occasionally grumble about turning on their computers to find 80 e-mail
messages. But for the most part, these travelers are happy to be wired, and their
enthusiasm shows in the mounds of information they post online.
Much of that information is decidedly homespun.
There are road-kill counts on line, as well as
detailed descriptions of scourges like "Bali belly." And then there's the online
"souvenir" collection that Scott and Laura Kruglewicz, a
"thirty-something" Atlanta couple, are maintaining during their yearlong,
36-country odyssey at www.worldwidewanderings.com.
Before they left home, Ms. Kruglewicz was a
customer service representative in the travel industry, while Kruglewicz was a sales and
marketing director at General Electric Capital. Now their souvenir bin contains pictures
of things like a Russian candy bar and a mummified Egyptian cat.
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Travelers, laden with digital gear: footloose,
but not fancy-free.
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"We've used technology to do the thing
that's most important to us -- share our experiences with those who weren't able to
come," the couple wrote in an e-mail message from Bangkok, Thailand. "Let them
travel vicariously through our adventures."
Technology is also important to Almitra
Von-Willcox, 51, from San Diego, who is on a walking tour of the world.
Ms. Von-Willcox was a single parent for 18
years, and she supported her three children mostly by working as a cocktail waitress and
renovating and selling rundown houses. She says it will take 14 years to complete her
trip. She is traveling with an Apple Powerbook computer, a digital camera, a printer, a
solar panel and a satellite-based navigation system. She is also posting her trip on the
Web under the moniker of Almitra the Photo Gypsy, www.photogypsy.com.
In a recent e-mail message from Australia, Ms.
Von-Willcox wrote that she hoped her Web site would help "more people around the
world learn the wonder and delight of the goodness of strangers, as well as the uniqueness
of other cultures." She added, "I also hope to be an inspiration to those who
need to challenge themselves."
Mr. and Ms. Kruglewicz are posting intriguing
online interviews with some of the people they have met on the road, and their travels are
being followed by a number of elementary school classes.
And John Berns, a former world traveler who is
now living in Bangkok, offers a host of technical tips, among other things, at his Web
site www.travelog.net, which he describes as "a geek, a digital camera and a laptop
go around the world."
That may be overly modest. Partly because Berns
has received so many inquiries about extended travel, he has turned his Web site into an
Internet publishing business for educating travelers. He posts his own global adventures,
often within hours after they occur. Berns quit a job in Internet publishing in 1997, when
he was 35, to hit the road. Now two of his closest companions are an I.B.M. Thinkpad 560
laptop and a Kodak DCS-120 digital camera. He also relies on Microsoft's Front Page
software to write and edit his Web pages quickly. To process and edit his travel photos,
he tends to rely on the Thumbsplus software from Cerious Software, although he also uses
Photoshop 4.0, by Adobe.
Even though a dried-squid vendor has set up
outside his apartment, Berns feels "amazingly connected" to the digital world,
he wrote in a recent e-mail message.
When George Mason, Salli Slaughter and their two
young daughters took off on a yearlong, 18-country "sabbatical" in late 1996,
they also wanted to stay wired.
On the road, the family used a Macintosh laptop,
a Web site and an Internet service provider to receive more than 100 e-mail messages a
week and get information from people in countries that they were about to visit, like
Greece and Egypt. Even though Mason and Ms. Slaughter home-schooled their daughters,
Samantha and Cassidy, while they were away, they used the Net to communicate with their
daughters' teachers back home and teachers elsewhere, like a Bulgarian math professor they
met in Japan. She helped Samantha, who was 14 when she left home, with her precalculus
homework over the Internet.
The Mason-Slaughter family used the computer
daily.
And the family's photo-packed adventure is still
online at www.worldhop.com.
It contains such decidedly personal notes as
Samantha's guide to Asian toilets and Mason's experience teaching the hokey-pokey in
Thailand.
The Net even helped the family return home.
After they got to England, near the end of their trip, they hunted for job leads by
sending e-mail messages to everyone they knew. One of the messages landed Mason -- who
turned 50 while he was on the road -- a public relations job in Portland, Ore., where he
and the family now live.
For the Mason-Slaughter family, the pros of
staying connected on the road definitely outweighed the cons. When the family left home,
Mason and Ms. Slaughter had just quit their jobs and given up their leased house. Two
weeks into the trip, the family's pet wolf died back in Anchorage, leaving them feeling
more disconnected.
"We were totally adrift," Ms.
Slaughter said recently. "So the Internet became a real place -- it wasn't just cyber
anymore."
Of course, going digital on an extended highway
abroad isn't always easy, as Ms. Johnson and Franke have found.
Before setting out on her travels last fall, Ms.
Johnson, a former seafood chef, spent two years preparing for the trip that she and
Franke, a former bilingual primary school teacher, would take. Their gear includes a
Toshiba Libretto laptop that weighs 1.87 pounds; a Ricoh digital camera and a telephone
hook-up kit that includes numerous adapter plugs, adapter jacks, a telephone line tester
and an acoustic coupler.
In addition, they are paying roughly $28 a month
for both an Internet service provider and a service called iPass, which provides them with
dial-up software and international-access phone numbers. Because iPass relies on local
phone numbers, wherever possible, for access to the Internet, Ms. Johnson and Franke are
using it to cut down on their connection charges overseas.
But those charges are adding up. Ms. Johnson and
Franke currently pay between $4 to $12 an hour for Internet access alone, which runs $20
to $40 a month. And then there are the costs of simply dialing up the Internet.
Because the couple are staying mostly in hotels,
even local phone calls tend to be extremely expensive. And when local numbers have not
worked, Ms. Johnson and Franke have had to gain access to the Internet through
long-distance calls.
Sometimes they have also had to turn to
cybercafes. That has usually been the case when iPass has failed them, or when they have
been unable to afford a room with a phone or when the quality of the phone lines has
simply been too poor. They estimate that they spend $15 to $30 a week for
computer-generated phone calls and cybercafes.
But relying on Internet cafes can create its own
set of headaches.
When Geoff and Lauren Slater took off on a
journey in late 1996 that eventually took them to more than a dozen countries, they soon
discovered that cybercafes tended to sprout up and disappear with alarming frequency.
And access to the Internet from the cafes varied
enormously in price; a cafe in La Paz, Bolivia, charged the Slaters 50 cents an hour,
while a cafe in Chile charged them $8 an hour. Before he went on the road, Slater quit a
job as a planning director for Boston's transit system, while Ms. Slater was an education
services manager for a software company.
Now the couple call Vermont their home, although
their global adventures are still posted online at the www.madriver.com/users/rtw2vt site.
Matt Donath, a former long-term traveler who is
now home in Chicago, spent weeks in India before he finally found a cybercafe that had
working equipment. He also discovered that many cafes he visited would deliberately
overestimate the amount of time he spent online, often tacking on the time he had to spend
simply waiting to be connected. Clearly, money is useful to the digital dharma bum, and
several sites post sponsorship information. Some of the travelers have managed to attract
sponsors, although many appear to be flying solo. Ms. Von-Willcox said she had not
approached anyone for money yet; the companies listed as sponsors, she said, have
contributed "stuff."
Many travelers now wouldn't dream of circling
the globe without being wired. The Slaters, for example, relied on the Net to stay in
contact with friends and family members, and Slater also turned to it to keep up with the
Boston Patriots.
Sometimes digital connections have helped
travelers in unexpected ways.
Take Donath. He cut short his round-the-world
trip in Singapore last winter, when it was discovered that his wife and traveling
companion, Sybil, had breast cancer.
Shortly after they came home, they received in
the mail a video about breast cancer that had been sent by an Internet user who had
visited the couple's Web site at www.travel-library.com/rtw/donath.
Donath said the video is helping his wife cope
with her disease. Before the recent explosion in the number of personal Web sites --
including those written by travelers like himself -- receiving such support "would
have been unimaginable," he wrote in a recent e-mail message.
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Related Sites These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has
no control over their content or availability.
www.wired2theworld.com
Round-the-World Travel Guide
www.worldwidewanderings.com
Almitra the Photo Gypsy
www.travelog.net
www.worldhop.com
www.madriver.com/users/rtw2vt
www.travel-library.com/rtw/donath |
