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Afterthoughts
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Thank you for listening You will still get mail from me here and there - I will definitely sent a message as soon as I've uploaded pictures from my trip. And remember, all the reports you received are also archived at http://jastram.de/travel/asia-2000. Communication while on the road But before they fade away completely, I wanted to share a few afterthoughts with you. There were things people asked me about over and over again, and other things that were quite different than I expected them to be. The topics I want to talk about are Communication, Food, and Transportation. Today I want to share my thoughts on Communication with you. I was planing to use two means of communication: Email and telephone. The long distance phone service I've been using for ages has a really cool feature: Toll free numbers in various countries, through which I could bill phone calls to my home account (No, it's not overpriced AT&T). All my destinations, except India, had numbers. Piece of cake - at least that's what I thought it would be... For email I simply redirected all my messages to my Yahoo account, and used their web interface. In addition, I set up a simple cgi script on my web site, so that the reports I would write would automatically be posted to my web site and sent to the mailing list. I was anticipating difficulties to find computers, especially in the less developed countries. Well, of course life was completely different than I expected. In Japan, I didn't have any problems whatsoever - not surprising, considering that it's a well developed country. While the keyboards had strange symbols on them, they still produced roman characters most of the time - once I got stuck in Kanji mode, and a friendly Japanese helped me to get back to the English alphabet. But already in Hong Kong I encountered the first problems, with the telephone, not email access! The toll free number was wrong, but through my provider's web site I found the correct one. It got worse in Thailand. Computers were available everywhere in "Access Centers", and they were dirt cheap - usually around $1 per hour, and the connection speed was sufficient for what I was doing. But my toll free number didn't work - at least not from every telephone. I had to go to the post office, and - check this out - fill out a long form to make a toll free phone call! Well, there was an alternative - I could go to private call centers where they would charge a connection fee for the toll free call - and they would kick you out after 15 minutes or so. In Malaysia, the toll free number didn't work at all, and the web site didn't have a different number, either; and after Singapore (where everything worked perfectly - what a relieve!), I was without telephone in India - but at least I knew that beforehand. Internet access in India was easy as well - but then again, I was in cities most of the time. Still, I was quite surprised. And what did I end up with? With hundreds of dollars in telephone costs, while I spent a fraction of that on email. My advice: If you go on vacation - anywhere - don't bother with the phone any more. For the price of leaving a short message on a voice mail box, you can use the Internet for hours. And you don't have to wake up your loved ones at 3 am because of time zones! |
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