My friend Jeff, in Nashville, e-mailed me a few weeks ago regarding working from the road. How was Internet access on my travels? By way of this post, I’m going to answer Jeff’s question because maybe some other people are wondering, too.
I have come to realize on this trip that I’m an Internet junkie. I haven’t even seen a TV, let alone watched it, since I left Banda Aceh about a month ago. The Internet is what I crave – information when I want it, how I want it. E-mail is my main mode of communication at the moment and even when I’m back home I’m (embarrassingly) much better at e-mailing someone than picking up the phone and calling them. So in that way, I guess that I am a product of my generation.
Since I left Banda Aceh – where I had free, 24-hour wireless around the clock, of all places! – the blog has gone from free (well, $8.95 a month for my Typepad service) to not so free. When I was in Sulawesi on Bunaken Island, the Internet was painfully slow. But right where the boat picked people up to take them to the island of Bunaken, in Manado, there was actually a high-speed internet place with broadband which was as fast as anything I’ve used.
I realized in Bunaken that it was a good idea to write everything up on my computer, and then figure out how to transfer it over to a computer with internet. This saves time and money as opposed to sitting at a computer with Internet and typing everything up and being charged by the minute. Usually I burn it onto a disk or sometimes the Internet café will take pity on me and let me use their memory stick, which has happened a few times and is really nice. This way, I can also spell check on my computer before I upload – but if you’ve noticed I don’t always do a good job of this. In Banda, each of my posts were looked over a few times lovingly and edited thoroughly. If I made some sort of mistake, I just logged back on and changed them. Now, it’s a little bit more on-the-run blogging, unfortunately, and I apologize if the quality has decreased a bit.
But I do want to stress how much I have enjoyed doing the blog and haven’t really considered stopping it. I am sometimes challenged by making sure that I am actually doing things to blog about, rather than getting stuck inside some boring internet café, but most of the time it’s not a problem. I realize now, however, how much I took the wireless in Banda for granted. I could blog whenever, instead of making it a planned event.
In Ubud it took me a few days to figure out what the locals already knew. There’s a place on Main St. called Highway that has extremely fast broadband that I can just plug into my computer. The only problem is that it is expensive – about $5 an hour. I balked at first but then, in the end, realized that I could be in and out of there in about ¼ of the time that it would take for me to do the same thing someplace else so in the end it all evened out. There’s also a really good wifi hookup at a restaurant called Dragonfly and if I’m not uploading any pictures then that’s where I like to go.
Uploading pictures – that’s the beign of my blogging existence. I think that pictures add so much and I’m actually excited about showing off my fun, little hobby. I’ve never been good with a camera and then once I met Rusel I don’t think I touched a camera for three years. It’s been fun to experiment with my crappy, five-year-old camera that will most likely get sent home from Paris because Rusel is bringing his regular digital camera, which I can use as well as an amazing new bells-and-whistles camera that he just bought for the trip. But uploading the pictures can really be hard. At Highway it’s quick and painless but in other places it’s anyone’s guess.
My rule of thumb at this point is the islands, or places near the water, are generally not the best places to get any work done. And most people don’t go to islands to work, as I’ve come to notice. So it’s really no big deal. The best thing is probably to check the guidebooks. Obviously the more remote, the less likely it is that there will be a good Internet connection but then again some places surprise you.
And then I came to Amed. Beautiful, amazing, magical Amed. With dial-up Internet. That’s right. Dial-up Internet. The last week has been so wonderful but the Internet issue has unfortunately turned some of my now sun-bleached hair gray. I am in the final final stages of the Gugus project. My amazing friend Steve “G” Gaydos copy edited the final document for me and sent it to me on Monday. I was unbelievably excited to see it in my e-mail in-box. Unfortunately, that’s all that I could do: look at it in my in-box. The computer’s connection was so slow that it couldn’t download my thirty page document.
After trying all of the three computers there, I was finally able to download it onto the desktop. Great! Next step, as I am being charged by the minute and it is blowing my budget, is to burn it onto a disk, take it back to Wawa Wewe, look and it and make changes, burn it onto yet another disk from my computer, take it back to the internet cafe, send it to Martin. One slight problem. The one computer that I was able to download it onto wouldn’t let me burn the disk!
Panic. Deep breath. Okay. New idea. I talked the woman who owned the café into letting me get off the internet (so the meter would stop running), make the changes and edits there on the computer, get back on the internet, send it to Martin, done. Whew. Ingenious! Working, working, working. That Steve. Thorough! Working….WHA!? Gone. The computer completely crashed. I had already been there about two hours, just to download one document and edit it. Now it was gone.
The woman looked at me as if I was crazy. I felt like a mad woman. I didn’t know what to do. I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore, that traveling about an hour away to what I had been told was “higher-speed” internet was my only option.
“Broadband? Wifi?” I asked the helpful guys at Wawa Wewe when they suggested driving me to another town. Blank stares. Oh no. Was I going to be traveling there only to be confronted with the dreaded dial – up again? I felt like I was being transported back to 1997. I could feel an Alanis Morisette song coming on.
I was walking back to my room dejectedly and ran right into Charles. He noticed the look on my face and I told him my frustrating story. As a writer, he knows all of the tricks. He asked me if I had burned it onto a disk. Check. Did I have a flash-disk? No. Stupid, but no. He didn’t either because he broke all of his by ejecting them wrong so he couldn’t lend one to me. Did I know that the guy who owned the dog who had the fits at Wawa Wewe I on Saturday night had wifi? Jackpot!
First thing the next morning, I walked over to Only You, the hotel that the German guy owned. His wife answered the door and I told her my sob story, all while petting her dog (this dog was actually cute, and I did feel as bad for him as I possibly could about his experience). Although the wifi and broadband was a rumor, he did have a faster dial-up connection than the one in the village. He very kindly let me copy the document to his hard drive and then he had a memory stick that I could transfer the document over to, and then I put it onto my desktop. Success!
I spent a few hours yesterday editing from the daybed on my veranda, burned the document onto a disk, went back into the village internet café and sent it off to Martin….and fingers crossed.
And the unsung hero in all of this is definitely Rusel, who has been patiently helping me lay the entire thing out. Hopefully I will be able to post it tomorrow or over the weekend.
Last night, when I went back into the village to do my regular blogging, I noticed another guy there on the computers working on his own laptop. At the end of his Internet session, he pulled the cable out of his computer, put it back into the café’s computer that he was sitting near, paid, and walked out. It was then that I realized that I could’ve just done the same, with my own computer, and avoided all of the drama. Sigh.
Lex’s Tips For Working On The Road:
-Try not to! Obviously, if you can help it, try to finish everything up before you leave. If you’re a writer, photographer, etc. and traveling is your thing then you probably don’t need me to tell you how to work from the road.
-Always carry a flash disk, which can be purchased quite cheaply before you leave and weighs next to nothing so it won’t cramp your style. You can then easily transfer things from your computer to computers at various Internet places along the way.
-Carry a few spare burnable CD’s, just in case all else fails.
-Determine free Internet wifi connections from the guidebooks. Go there and order a cup of tea or a glass of wine and hook-up. If you can, book accommodation at hotels with free wifi.
-Make sure that you pack a universal adaptor to give your computer the juice it so desperately needs to run. Also, it might not hurt to bring a bit of tape, as sometimes it's a challenge to get everything working together: adaptor, computer plug, electrical socket.
