Technology and travel

As I sit here in my hotel in Santiago (not in my room, but in kind of an anteroom behind reception, so that I can get better Wifi) I'm kind of liking this, and kind of wondering, what the hell am I doing in front of a computer rather than at a club or at the very least, tucked up with a book.

Technology sure is convenient, and earlier this evening I made a Skype call to my mom, who likes the fact that I can still call her from South America. And that book I could be reading would be on my Kindle, so that I don't have to weigh down my already back-breaking backpack with long tomes for the road.

It's all good, but something gnaws at me that vacation is not the right time to be thinking about Wifi signal strength or flickr upload times. Vacation used to be when you more or less gave up the mod cons and just lived out of that turtle on your back. And I'm only talking the 1980s--when I kept in contact via postcards and the occasional phone call--not decades ago when travel meant being thoroughly cut off from home. I carried around rolls of film, to be developed with feverish interest when I got home to see how the shots turned out.

I remember the first time I sent an email on holiday: it was from a computer in a Greek restaurant in Mexico in 1997. I thought at the time that it would probably be something we'd all be doing eventually, but I underestimated the convenience with which we'd be able to do it. This time I packed a netbook and a Kindle, and will probably get a prepaid cell phone (family likes to keep in touch). I'll probably be uploading a bunch of photos to flickr in the next few days.

So, has something of the romance of travel been lost? More importantly, is travel no longer a voyage into some kind of different world than the one we know, because we're constantly in touch with what we left behind? Yeah, maybe, but I doubt I'll give any of this up. For one thing, communication and dissemination of information aren't bad things. My friends aren't here with me, but they get to know something about what Chile is like. And I don't get as lonely.