My Top 5 Travel Gadgets

Perhaps it all started with a boyhood fascination with James Bond and his ever present array of cool spy gadgetry. I’ve always dreamed of being ushered into the depths of the London Underground to the secret home of Q-Branch to be issued my watch that does everything but keep good time, a jet pack and of course my new Aston Martin. Suffice to say that the reality of Desmond Llewelyn actually sorting me out with the spyware is near on impossible – and not only because dear old Desmond is dead. So if I can’t have the cool gadgets from the movies, what about the ones that I can buy from Radeoshack?

As a frequent traveler and gadget aficionado I’ve got some bits of technology that really have become near on essential. And with a little drum role here they are:


5) The Cell Phone – cellular phones have become modus operandi for damn near everyone in the world these days. Not just teenagers and stock brokers – I’ve seen Massai kids in Tanzania pull them from their traditional cloaks and everyday folks in Caribbean slums txting one another. They have become pervasive – everywhere. What I love about them for traveling is the ability to keep in contact with people back home at your fingertips. It may cost a fortune to ‘roam’ with your phone, so the best thing to do is get a local ‘sim’ card – it will cost you about $10 and with that you get a local number. You can then make local calls inexpensively and send txt messages to anywhere in the word for pennies.


4) The iPod – I remember when I went traveling for the first time many years ago, I spent days and days pre-departure making mix-tapes for my walkman. I knew I only had room for two or three tapes and they had to last me half a year. It was an agonizing process and within 30 minutes of leaving home I wished that I’d brought other tunes. Fast-forward to the iPod generation and all is different, so different. I have enough music on my iPod that I could listen to it continuously on most of my trips and never repeat a single song. Beyond that I have books on tape, podcasts from around the world (I’m learning to speak Arabic at the moment from one) and photos and video too. There are some who say that to truly osmosicly absorb the flavour of a destination you should forgo your music and just listen to what the country sounds like. That sounds like a bunch of pseudo-Theroux-ian hogwash – try spending 10hours in an airport waiting for a delayed flight, 15 hours on a bus or 3 minutes next to a screaming baby without some audio comfort.


3) GPS – I’ll admit it I’m a bit of a map geek – perhaps it stems from not having the best sense of direction, especially in cities, I always seem to have my face in a map. I love to know where I am and where I want to go. That’s why I love GPS technology – when you’ve got integrated maps in the GPS it’s even better. It’s like a video game and you are the star, the flashing red dot in the middle of the map – never to be lost again. Doubters will say that a GPS will never replace the good old compass – put that sounds a lot like what the sextant gurus said when that new famdangled compass arrived on the scene.


2) The Laptop – ever heard of a ‘flashpacker’? A flashpacker is a slightly upmarket backpacker who isn’t afraid to spend a bit more money to rent a car, do a cool activity or have a nice meal. They roll their luggage and more often then not have a laptop in their shoulder bag. With the ever-presence of wifi connectivity all over the place now (my favourite was at a campground in rural Saskatchewan) the laptop has become your travel agent, journal, connection home, photo storage device and cinema. Laptops used to be bulky, slow and prohibitively expensive – not so any more. Just have a look at the new ASUS EEE PC (http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=164 ) it’s only slightly larger then a PDA, it runs windows XP, has a full keyboard, is wifi capable and retails for around $300 US! Who cares if it gets nicked at that price!


1) The Digital Camera – you knew it was going to be on the list somewhere and for me it is most definitely number one. Looking back at that first trip again, I remember carting around 50 rolls of slide film. I was scared shitless that they were going to get fogged in an airport x-ray machine, stolen, lost or just not be any good. Well that fear is well and truly gone. I now shoot a camera called a Canon G9 – it’s 12.1 mega-pixels, fully manual, looks much like a Leica Rangefinder and slides easily into my pocket. My SLR is gathering dust on my mantle – why would I lug that big thing around now? This little baby shoots in RAW, records time-lapse movies and is as sharp as any glass I’ve ever used. It’s loaded up with an 8GB card so I can shoot in the neighbourhood of 2000 full-res JPG’s and still have space to spare.

Those are my top 5 – what are yours? Did I miss something unmissible?

Cheers,
sk