The Joys of Blogging Afield

Back in the halcyon days of the 1980s, our only form of communication when travelling was poste restante and the phone. Poste Restante required lining up at post offices in faraway places hoping that mail from family had arrived. It was very exciting and a priority to do on the first day in a new country, town or city. Phoning was hideously expensive and required going to the post office to book a call.

In the 1990s, once the internet had been invented, then we would find an internet café and pay big bucks for a dial up connection to pick up email. We would send great long email screeds to our whole address book.

Once the world wide web took off in the late 1990s, the graphic user interface enabled blogging, which we took to like butter chicken on rice as we realized that it was poor etiquette to send unwanted emails to people when we could post our blog and then if people were interested they could just go on it and read. We could also add photos. Ultimately the blog enabled us to communicate with our parents that we were not dead and also provide us with a digital record of our travels.

Now, although blogs are almost as out of date as poste restante, we still blog our travels as our main audience (Jenny’s parents) are comfortable with the blog concept and we still like the idea of a digital record of our travels which can accommodate some longish form writing. Most hotels and guesthouses now provide free wifi, although the networks are sometimes overloaded when everyone else is using them at the same time. And we have old phones and an even older laptop that we travel with, so we are often unable to post, or add photos when we want to, which means we are often further ahead in our travels than our blog would indicate.