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At the end of the 90s backpacking in Asia wasn't all that different. I did this for several months at a time without a cell phone, internet cafés were very slow

by stef25 8y ago

At the end of the 90s backpacking in Asia wasn't all that different. I did this for several months at a time without a cell phone, internet cafés were very slow and unreliable and there was no good way to book budget accommodation anyway. Lonely planet was the only decent source of info but it didn't cover it all. I spent some time on islands in the Mekong in Laos where there was only a few hrs of electricity per day and no connection to the outside world. To leave I took a motorised canoe to the mainland and then found out the next flight out of Pakse was in a few days, so I spent several days there doing basically nothing. Now that kind of time wasting just seems almost unfathomable. Every where I arrived I had no bookings, just a few addresses from Lonely Planet that you'd have to reach to inquire if they had free rooms. I've rarely been as happy as I was travelling around there with just a bag of clothes on my back. Good times.

ghaff 8y ago
It wasn't until you really got into the late 2000s that things started to change. And, even then, really ubiquitous mapping/GPS, more and more being online, machine translation, etc. have changed traveling to places like China on almost a year-by-year basis over the past decade. It probably boggles a lot of people's minds that even 20 years or so ago, taking off on certain types of trips to many parts of the world meant, at best, infrequent contact and, often, essentially disappearing. Today I expect there's increasingly an expectation that you'd get a satellite messaging system under those circumstances. The difference in information availability generally is astounding. I imagine that would drive most of us crazy generally if you go back a few decades.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  One of the highlights of coming back from my trips back in the 80s was reading through the month of Swedish newspapers that had piled up in my apartment and get "fast forwarded" on all the news that had happened while I was away. I was careful to sort them by date and not peek on the newer one so I didn't get "spoiled" :) Today, even when I travel to quite remote corners of the world, I spend much of the day on the same web sites as usual, reading the same things, talking to the same people. In a sense, I'm never really leaving my regular life, for better and for worse.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  I spent 6 months living and backpacking through Southeast Asia in 2010 and even then, I'd say my experience was very similar to the article in the OP. Yea, there was Lonely Planet, but hardly anyone carried one around with them since it was bigger than a brick. And even those who did use Lonely Planet books, it was because every hostel had a LP book in its communal library that people would flip through while sitting at the hostel bar. As for internet/cell service, it was mostly the same story. You could get cell service if you really wanted, but it was usually pretty costly and I don't think I met anyone who actually did buy it (I did for 1 week just to see if it would be worth it - it wasn't). Everyone seemed to prefer to use the hostel bar as the place were people gathered to use WiFi. And even just 8 years ago, WiFi in most parts of SEA were nowhere near good enough to do things like video chat, and in some places it wasn't even good enough to do live text chats. Some communities (esp. in rural areas) didn't have internet at all. An email every few days was the best I could do with most of my friends. Infrequent contact was pretty well understood then too, at least among the travelers I interacted with. When it came to getting around, some people had maps that they'd printed out and carried with them, but I'd say most people relied on word of mouth and asking other people for directions and arranging rides. It does seem to be quite a different story now. I've been back to SEA often in the past 8 years and each time I am surprised at the changes. The "banana pancake trail" has hit the mainstream, and the tourist infrastructure has grown to match. Buying a prepaid SIM card with unlimited data seems to be the first thing people do when getting off the plane in SEA. Hell, my cell provider (T-Mobile) gives me free data in every SEA country without even having to swap SIM cards. Uber/Grab is used for getting around in many places, totally removing the need for maps or asking directions. And you can get 4G coverage in all but the most remote jungles.
- random878 8y ago
  >It probably boggles a lot of people's minds that even 20 years or so ago, taking off on certain types of trips to many parts of the world meant, at best, infrequent contact and, often, essentially disappearing This was a highlight of travel back then in my mind. Full and complete disconnect from 'the world' back home. There was no guilt trip about lack of contact either - it was just accepted that there would be an email as an when an internet cafe could be found.
weeksie 8y ago
Totally. The first time I was in India was 2006 and the second was in 2016. Talk about a different experience. I mean, India is still India but having that map and actual internet access, no matter how intermittent made a lot of difference. It also drastically cut down on interactions because there was no need to ask directions. Being lost will force you out of your comfort zone quicksmart and that just stopped happening in a post iPhone + maps world.
- erikb 8y ago
  Yeah, right? I had this experience in China. You move from being really far outside of what's happening and where things are and what people talk to almost being able to go anywhere yourself, talk to almost anybody and find out what's going on. Smartphones have changed travelling a lot. Although you must sure to get a good VPN before going to China.
cgh 8y ago
I traveled through Turkey in 1993. The PTT (phone monopoly) had a saying which doubled as a vision statement: "A phone in every village!" They hadn't met that goal and I'd sometimes roll into these little places where there were no phones at all. But there was always one TV set in the tea house because football. I'm really glad I caught the tail end of pre-internet travel in the '90s. I've been overseas since but it is not the same. The sense of journeying into the unknown is simply gone.
- rlue 8y ago
  The flip side of this is that access to electricity and telecommunications is lifting most of the world out of the Dark Ages.
m3nu 8y ago
Same here. Backpacking Asia in mid-2000s. Already had a digital camera, but had to stop at internet cafes now and then to burn them to CD and mail them home. Haha.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  I’s Imagine that every Internet cafe in every developing country had them for duplicating VCDs:
- et-al 8y ago
  Did the exact same thing, but was super paranoid, so bought CD-Rs from two different brands and and made two copies every time I burned a CD. One to send home, the other to carry with me throughout my journey. One of my CDs did have some corrupt images, so that redundancy paid off.
Baeocystin 8y ago
I lived in Laos in the late 70's/Early 80's. Even with full use of the diplomatic pouch, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip, with only a ~80% success rate. We'd learned to send one, then its carbon copy with the next bag, just in case. Phoning home was utterly impossible. The only cable line back was a fax machine the size of a refrigerator that went straight to the State Department, and was the only room guarded by stern men with guns. (the slightly more disposable diplomats themselves had only local, unarmed security to pick from. This was a non-trivial risk- while we were there, the Japanese ambassador and his wife were both murdered. Perhaps surprisingly to some in modern times, Americans were pretty well received by the local population. It was safer for us to go shopping than, say, the French, Russians, or Japanese, although it was still too much of a risk for me to go to a local school. The Australians were the most popular, although I strongly suspect this was also linked to them having a nice swimming pool that they shared with everyone.) The only doctor we had access to was a retired, somewhat eccentric Swedish veterinarian who specialized in pigs, and pigs were pretty close to people for most things. (He kept a copy of Playboar on his office reception table.) And finally, I remember getting chased through the metal detector (they didn't really care about guns, for the most part. It was people trying to carry durian in an enclosed space that really pissed them off) by a scared water buffalo in the airport, which then proceeded to run around on the airstrip for an hour until the local kid from the farm it came from hopped on his back and rode him home. Of course, nowadays I can pull up any of half a dozen free webcams and see who is strolling down the streets near where I once lived. It feels like a lifetime ago, and yet I'm barely in my mid-40's as it is. Things sure do change fast.
- stef25 8y ago
  Parents of a friend of mine were Swedish diplomats in Vientiane in the 70s, apparently the world of expats there at the time was very small? It must have been magical (communist dictatorship aside). Laotians to me always seem even happier than the Thais. On a packed bus ride in Laos full of dirt poor locals, a few chickens and tied up pigs, there was a guy in the back having a shouting conversation with the driver in the front. They were enjoying it a lot. Other passengers started to chuckle along, you could tell there was a crescendo building. Eventually the conversation ended in an explosion of rapturous laughter from everyone on the bus. It was impossible not to laugh along despite not having a clue what it was all about. Looking around you'd see nothing but huge smiles, all black teeth from beetle nut. There's dozens of these little moments I'll never forget.
jen729w 8y ago
Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking. I did the SE Asia thing in 2003 and it was magical. We met strangers over beer and cigarettes and had all sorts of random conversations. You booked a bus to the next place in the local travel agent. I’ve still never figured out how the tickets worked; how the bus company back in Pnomh Penh knew that someone in Sihanoukville* had bought a ticket. I’ve been back a bunch of times since, and now it’s just kids on their phones. A couple of years ago I sat behind a pair of Swedish girls on a beach in Koh Tao: sunset over idyllic beach ahead, cheap cocktail in hand, beanbag-under-bum, yet I watched the two of them just cycle through the social media apps on their phones checking for updates. It was all I could do to not ask them why they’d bothered coming away. It was tragic and it made me sad. (*An unbelievable paradise in 2003. A total shit-hole now.)
- csomar 8y ago
  Looks like some people are celebrating their victory back at Palo Alto.
- konschubert 8y ago
  I agree with you but keep in mind that we're also getting older which makes it harder for us to re-live the magic of our youth.
  - jen729w 8y ago
    That is a factor, but I was 27 when I did my "champagne backpacking". I was no starry-eyed 18 year old, although of course my eyes are considerably less starry now at 42 than they were at 27...
- stef25 8y ago
  > Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking. It's one of those arrogant, old fart things to say and you wouldn't understand it unless you'd lived it but it's 100% true. EDIT - what's also contributed to this is AirAsia. Now you can have breakfast in Hanoi and lunch in Phuket on the same day for just 50 bucks of travel costs. Back then you'd fly for 10x more or taking several days of gruelling overland travel and it's those moments that add the kind of character to trips that's now hard to obtain.
saiya-jin 8y ago
This describes well my trip to India & Nepal in 2008 and 2010 (6 months total, mostly Himalaya + Andamans and a bit of western Thar desert). Just one fat LP book for whole effin' India with list of hotels, sights and way to get to next place. Those few internet cafes were old virus-laden desktops, with internet connection often in bytes/second, where sending email back home took easily 30-60 minutes, especially if you wanted to send a single tiny picture. Connections frequently dropped of course. I didn't even take my basic phone with me, never regretting it. The thing is, if you have 3 months or more, you just don't care about the pace. You can't do similar backpacking in 2 weeks, people end up rushing around to see as much as possible. So many random meetings with strangers because we were clueless, ending up being invited into their homes for a dinner. Ending up on a 1km long beautiful empty beach in Goa, with like 2-3 other people on it. Seeing satellite photos now, its one bar next to the other. These days, even if I carry my phone with me, I have it turned off for days in a row. Mostly turn it to check airbnb or write something to my parents. Otherwise it just ruins the submersion into the experience a bit.
bogomipz 8y ago
I had a very similar experience at that same time in Laos. Waiting days to be able to cross the Mekong. Exchanging money for local currency resulted in obscene piles of cash that made me feel like a bank robber. "The bus" was an ancient truck with wooden slat seats in the back and stopped for everyone and everything - animals, welding kit, more people. There were no paved roads, most villages had no power after dark so it was candle light, playing card and conversation for entertainment. I remember when I decided to leave it took days to get to Luang Prabang. Everything felt sort of adventurous and rewarding. I was glad I got to experience it. Aside from a couple places I have rarely experienced that level of buzz from traveling since then.

by stef25 8y ago

ghaff 8y ago

It wasn't until you really got into the late 2000s that things started to change. And, even then, really ubiquitous mapping/GPS, more and more being online, machine translation, etc. have changed traveling to places like China on almost a year-by-year basis over the past decade. It probably boggles a lot of people's minds that even 20 years or so ago, taking off on certain types of trips to many parts of the world meant, at best, infrequent contact and, often, essentially disappearing. Today I expect there's increasingly an expectation that you'd get a satellite messaging system under those circumstances. The difference in information availability generally is astounding. I imagine that would drive most of us crazy generally if you go back a few decades.

BurningFrog 8y ago
One of the highlights of coming back from my trips back in the 80s was reading through the month of Swedish newspapers that had piled up in my apartment and get "fast forwarded" on all the news that had happened while I was away. I was careful to sort them by date and not peek on the newer one so I didn't get "spoiled" :) Today, even when I travel to quite remote corners of the world, I spend much of the day on the same web sites as usual, reading the same things, talking to the same people. In a sense, I'm never really leaving my regular life, for better and for worse.
txcwpalpha 8y ago
I spent 6 months living and backpacking through Southeast Asia in 2010 and even then, I'd say my experience was very similar to the article in the OP. Yea, there was Lonely Planet, but hardly anyone carried one around with them since it was bigger than a brick. And even those who did use Lonely Planet books, it was because every hostel had a LP book in its communal library that people would flip through while sitting at the hostel bar. As for internet/cell service, it was mostly the same story. You could get cell service if you really wanted, but it was usually pretty costly and I don't think I met anyone who actually did buy it (I did for 1 week just to see if it would be worth it - it wasn't). Everyone seemed to prefer to use the hostel bar as the place were people gathered to use WiFi. And even just 8 years ago, WiFi in most parts of SEA were nowhere near good enough to do things like video chat, and in some places it wasn't even good enough to do live text chats. Some communities (esp. in rural areas) didn't have internet at all. An email every few days was the best I could do with most of my friends. Infrequent contact was pretty well understood then too, at least among the travelers I interacted with. When it came to getting around, some people had maps that they'd printed out and carried with them, but I'd say most people relied on word of mouth and asking other people for directions and arranging rides. It does seem to be quite a different story now. I've been back to SEA often in the past 8 years and each time I am surprised at the changes. The "banana pancake trail" has hit the mainstream, and the tourist infrastructure has grown to match. Buying a prepaid SIM card with unlimited data seems to be the first thing people do when getting off the plane in SEA. Hell, my cell provider (T-Mobile) gives me free data in every SEA country without even having to swap SIM cards. Uber/Grab is used for getting around in many places, totally removing the need for maps or asking directions. And you can get 4G coverage in all but the most remote jungles.
random878 8y ago
>It probably boggles a lot of people's minds that even 20 years or so ago, taking off on certain types of trips to many parts of the world meant, at best, infrequent contact and, often, essentially disappearing This was a highlight of travel back then in my mind. Full and complete disconnect from 'the world' back home. There was no guilt trip about lack of contact either - it was just accepted that there would be an email as an when an internet cafe could be found.

weeksie 8y ago

Totally. The first time I was in India was 2006 and the second was in 2016. Talk about a different experience. I mean, India is still India but having that map and actual internet access, no matter how intermittent made a lot of difference. It also drastically cut down on interactions because there was no need to ask directions. Being lost will force you out of your comfort zone quicksmart and that just stopped happening in a post iPhone + maps world.

erikb 8y ago
Yeah, right? I had this experience in China. You move from being really far outside of what's happening and where things are and what people talk to almost being able to go anywhere yourself, talk to almost anybody and find out what's going on. Smartphones have changed travelling a lot. Although you must sure to get a good VPN before going to China.

cgh 8y ago

I traveled through Turkey in 1993. The PTT (phone monopoly) had a saying which doubled as a vision statement: "A phone in every village!" They hadn't met that goal and I'd sometimes roll into these little places where there were no phones at all. But there was always one TV set in the tea house because football. I'm really glad I caught the tail end of pre-internet travel in the '90s. I've been overseas since but it is not the same. The sense of journeying into the unknown is simply gone.

rlue 8y ago
The flip side of this is that access to electricity and telecommunications is lifting most of the world out of the Dark Ages.

m3nu 8y ago

Same here. Backpacking Asia in mid-2000s. Already had a digital camera, but had to stop at internet cafes now and then to burn them to CD and mail them home. Haha.

Scoundreller 8y ago
I’s Imagine that every Internet cafe in every developing country had them for duplicating VCDs:
et-al 8y ago
Did the exact same thing, but was super paranoid, so bought CD-Rs from two different brands and and made two copies every time I burned a CD. One to send home, the other to carry with me throughout my journey. One of my CDs did have some corrupt images, so that redundancy paid off.

Baeocystin 8y ago

I lived in Laos in the late 70's/Early 80's. Even with full use of the diplomatic pouch, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip, with only a ~80% success rate. We'd learned to send one, then its carbon copy with the next bag, just in case. Phoning home was utterly impossible. The only cable line back was a fax machine the size of a refrigerator that went straight to the State Department, and was the only room guarded by stern men with guns. (the slightly more disposable diplomats themselves had only local, unarmed security to pick from. This was a non-trivial risk- while we were there, the Japanese ambassador and his wife were both murdered. Perhaps surprisingly to some in modern times, Americans were pretty well received by the local population. It was safer for us to go shopping than, say, the French, Russians, or Japanese, although it was still too much of a risk for me to go to a local school. The Australians were the most popular, although I strongly suspect this was also linked to them having a nice swimming pool that they shared with everyone.) The only doctor we had access to was a retired, somewhat eccentric Swedish veterinarian who specialized in pigs, and pigs were pretty close to people for most things. (He kept a copy of Playboar on his office reception table.) And finally, I remember getting chased through the metal detector (they didn't really care about guns, for the most part. It was people trying to carry durian in an enclosed space that really pissed them off) by a scared water buffalo in the airport, which then proceeded to run around on the airstrip for an hour until the local kid from the farm it came from hopped on his back and rode him home. Of course, nowadays I can pull up any of half a dozen free webcams and see who is strolling down the streets near where I once lived. It feels like a lifetime ago, and yet I'm barely in my mid-40's as it is. Things sure do change fast.

stef25 8y ago
Parents of a friend of mine were Swedish diplomats in Vientiane in the 70s, apparently the world of expats there at the time was very small? It must have been magical (communist dictatorship aside). Laotians to me always seem even happier than the Thais. On a packed bus ride in Laos full of dirt poor locals, a few chickens and tied up pigs, there was a guy in the back having a shouting conversation with the driver in the front. They were enjoying it a lot. Other passengers started to chuckle along, you could tell there was a crescendo building. Eventually the conversation ended in an explosion of rapturous laughter from everyone on the bus. It was impossible not to laugh along despite not having a clue what it was all about. Looking around you'd see nothing but huge smiles, all black teeth from beetle nut. There's dozens of these little moments I'll never forget.

jen729w 8y ago

Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking. I did the SE Asia thing in 2003 and it was magical. We met strangers over beer and cigarettes and had all sorts of random conversations. You booked a bus to the next place in the local travel agent. I’ve still never figured out how the tickets worked; how the bus company back in Pnomh Penh knew that someone in Sihanoukville* had bought a ticket. I’ve been back a bunch of times since, and now it’s just kids on their phones. A couple of years ago I sat behind a pair of Swedish girls on a beach in Koh Tao: sunset over idyllic beach ahead, cheap cocktail in hand, beanbag-under-bum, yet I watched the two of them just cycle through the social media apps on their phones checking for updates. It was all I could do to not ask them why they’d bothered coming away. It was tragic and it made me sad. (*An unbelievable paradise in 2003. A total shit-hole now.)

csomar 8y ago
Looks like some people are celebrating their victory back at Palo Alto.
konschubert 8y ago
I agree with you but keep in mind that we're also getting older which makes it harder for us to re-live the magic of our youth.
- jen729w 8y ago
  That is a factor, but I was 27 when I did my "champagne backpacking". I was no starry-eyed 18 year old, although of course my eyes are considerably less starry now at 42 than they were at 27...
stef25 8y ago
> Mobile phones, free wifi, Facebook, Instagram – and all that – have ruined backpacking. It's one of those arrogant, old fart things to say and you wouldn't understand it unless you'd lived it but it's 100% true. EDIT - what's also contributed to this is AirAsia. Now you can have breakfast in Hanoi and lunch in Phuket on the same day for just 50 bucks of travel costs. Back then you'd fly for 10x more or taking several days of gruelling overland travel and it's those moments that add the kind of character to trips that's now hard to obtain.

saiya-jin 8y ago

This describes well my trip to India & Nepal in 2008 and 2010 (6 months total, mostly Himalaya + Andamans and a bit of western Thar desert). Just one fat LP book for whole effin' India with list of hotels, sights and way to get to next place. Those few internet cafes were old virus-laden desktops, with internet connection often in bytes/second, where sending email back home took easily 30-60 minutes, especially if you wanted to send a single tiny picture. Connections frequently dropped of course. I didn't even take my basic phone with me, never regretting it. The thing is, if you have 3 months or more, you just don't care about the pace. You can't do similar backpacking in 2 weeks, people end up rushing around to see as much as possible. So many random meetings with strangers because we were clueless, ending up being invited into their homes for a dinner. Ending up on a 1km long beautiful empty beach in Goa, with like 2-3 other people on it. Seeing satellite photos now, its one bar next to the other. These days, even if I carry my phone with me, I have it turned off for days in a row. Mostly turn it to check airbnb or write something to my parents. Otherwise it just ruins the submersion into the experience a bit.

bogomipz 8y ago

I had a very similar experience at that same time in Laos. Waiting days to be able to cross the Mekong. Exchanging money for local currency resulted in obscene piles of cash that made me feel like a bank robber. "The bus" was an ancient truck with wooden slat seats in the back and stopped for everyone and everything - animals, welding kit, more people. There were no paved roads, most villages had no power after dark so it was candle light, playing card and conversation for entertainment. I remember when I decided to leave it took days to get to Luang Prabang. Everything felt sort of adventurous and rewarding. I was glad I got to experience it. Aside from a couple places I have rarely experienced that level of buzz from traveling since then.