Gadgetry

I have to apologise foremost, as this post isn't strictly about our travels. I am writing it in the hope that it may be of some use to those planning a travelling trip soon.

This post is about gadgets. It's mostly about the plans we have made, considerations we had to make, and plan's of how we will live and rely on the tech we take.

Firstly is the method of communication. I will take my smartphone, a nexus 4, which I'm writing this post on now. This allows text if we have a sim card as well as email and instant message where we have WiFi, which is available almost everywhere these days.
We did consider a tablet, and normally, for most trips I believe this would be the perfect choice, but Jo and I will be wanting to update our blogs, sync our music, and do basic word processing functions using word, excel and the like as we intend to settle in Australia for a while. Due to this, we think we need a small laptop, so that will be out second piece of tech.

It's at this point I need to mention the caution that must be taken when thinking about what to take. Our last trip we took an the year old BlackBerry and a kindle, and thought this to be too much, only to find several people with their heads such in their laptops in our first hostel in cape town. These can be great tools, but hostels are very sociable places, and travelers pride themselves on chatting to each other openly no matter where they are, so to bury your head and destroy the  approachability, you stand to have a very lonely time. I remember one man who would watch films on his laptop in a hostel day and night. I spent three nights in the same room as this man and never spoke to him, whereas some of the best friends I made were on buses where we only had a chance to speak a few words at toilet breaks. The point being, if I or the other person on those bus trips stood apart with headphones in, we wouldn't have talked. I had an iPod on the last trip and will take one again, but I will only listen to it when we're closed off from others and it doesn't come across as  antisocial.

Moving slightly aside from tablets are ereaders which we took last time. These are great basic bits of kit that keep going for days, so in that way I think they are better than tablets of that is what you will be doing on them mostly. Sadly, they do eliminate the chance of book swapping which is widely available in hostels or with other travellers, which is a little unfortunate, as it means you don't end up reading some very random things you wouldn't normally try, but it does greatly reduce the weight of your bag, so swings and roundabouts I suppose.

Like many others, I have a lot of films and music on an external hard drive. I actually have two for backup purposes, both western digital passport, one being 1tb, the other being 2tb. Now I thought it would be very handy to be able to watch my films etc on my phone, so I have invested 30 quid in something new to me; a Kingston Mobilelite. This is smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and about the same weight which you can plug in sd cards or usb drives. It can even power hard drives like my passports and you can access all the files via WiFi that the clever little box transmits locally itself. In theory this means if you want share photos with several people when you're up a mountain, you can send them to everyone's tablets and phones.

Final piece of tech is something that came with us last time; a mini speaker about the size of a conker. This is self powered, lasts hours, is remarkably loud for its size, and only cost about 15 quid. Best of all, it's already been around the world once and lived to tell the tale, so it's coming again. This is great for when you have a crappy guesthouse room with just a bed in it and you have a hangover, or if you're in a dorm and getting ready to go out. It can also create a more social and easy going atmosphere for getting to know people.

That's it! A quick note hopefully advise anyone out there about to embark on a trip!

TTFN

x

The plan

Whoops, seems that I'm not as au fait with modern technology as I thought, and the multiple paragraphs of pure gold I wrote last night have vanished into the ether. Oh well, second rate writing a second time around it is!

So the plan, yes, thought I would put something down on here that I could look back on with amusement one day when what we actually do bears no resemblance.

Our "plan" as I've already said, is a loose one: bugger off for a month/2 months of fun in the Philippines, followed by a move to Perth to make our fortunes for 1-2 years, in which time we will have lots of family and friends visiting, and then take all the money we've saved and blow it traveling around South America and Latin America, hopefully tying in a portion of time in Brazil during the Olympics.

I am not misguided enough to have preconceptions that this will go to plan; I know fully well that the flight out of the UK may be the only thing that goes to plan. To be honest though, neither of us mind. Provided we are happy, and can support ourselves we will be fine and dandy.

The Australian economy, though very strong, is not as strong as it was a couple of years ago, and should we find that we cannot save the masses of money we anticipated, we will simply move on. With any luck we'll at least save enough to cover the £330 our visas cost us, and fund a flight on the next leg of the journey. Personally, I would love to go to New Zealand again and maybe get back on the tools in Christchurch, but Jo finds the country too bloody cold. If I wangled a house with an open fire I think she'd be there in a shot, but the odds of that are up there with Jo scuba diving with me again.

At time of writing, we are 102 days from flying out again, and the plan formed, though seemingly loose, is vivid and colourful in our minds in order to get us through our final weeks at work. We have fantasised and discussed at length the things we want to do, and speculated on new things to eat and drink. We don't know where to go to do these things, or what new delicacies we will be trying, but it is the experience of not knowing, and the freedom of deciding each morning what we are going to do that day that we are relishing feeling once again.

I'm sure Jo will start to form a more solid food man in her mind closer to our departure, but this will be more of a loose guide. It's a little like revising for a test when you don't know what the questions will be on. You can read up on some select areas, and have that small amount of prior knowledge (such how far to move the decimal point in a quote from a tuk-tuk driver in order to not get ripped off), but otherwise, you're at the mercy of what the examiners have put in the test.

I look back over this post and notice I've written rather a lot about not much. I'm sure this ratio will suddenly flip in the opposite direction soon enough, so I'll enjoy it while I can.

TTFN

1 year on...

So here we are, almost 1 year after my last post.

We landed home on 25th September 2012, and I spent roughly 36 hours getting over jetlag before being dragged to work on a roof in Brighton with my mate Vegas. This did have the advantage of exhausting me so thoroughly that my bodyclock automatically reset itself.
Jo and I then spent a couple of days doing little else but feel cold and sorry for ourselves as we had minus money (that's worse than no money!). We resolved to get jobs, and moved in with Jo's sister Liv for a very reasonable rent.
Jo ummed and ahhed, but in the end went back to her old gym. I spent the grand total of 6 days job hunting before being offered a job at the first interview I went to. The job seemed ok (Quantity Surveying), but I wasn't too worried as we were already hatching a plan....

Fast forward 11 months, and we have had a great Christmas, managed to get away for a few weekends, catch up with new friends made along our travels, but mostly just work work work, and plan plan plan for the next installment!

In June we booked our flights to the Philippines. Why Philippines? Because Jo read a paragraph written on it in a Guesthouse visitors book in China somewhere. It sounded good, so it became stop number one. We will leave the UK on Jan 2nd 2014, spend 6 weeks(ish) there, and then head back to Oz to work for a while, top up the bank account in the sunshine, and hopefully raise enough to continue traveling onto South America.

The plan is a lot looser than last time, and we're both happy to work our way around this time, and we've realised that so long as we're self supporting and happy, we should keep going, as the line we always heard from family and friends that "no news really, nothing's changed" is pretty much true, and we won't miss out on much (unfortunately, apart from the wedding of Samba, one of my oldest mates).

So there it is; the plan. Well, sort of a plan.... more of a loose guide.... a loose flexible guide for the next trip.
I'm fully aware that no-one will probably read this, but it's nice to record it. I will put another post up when we've got all our stuff together and laid it out on the bed pre-packing, and then recommence blogging as we continue our travels. Hopefully I'll pull my finger out and do it more often, no promises though....