Internet and gadgets!

We often think about the tremendous difference between travelling in India (and everywhere else) today compared to how it was when Christel traveled around the world 28 years ago. What we remember is that things took so much longer time in the good old days, everything from booking a train ticket to keep in touch with family and friends back home in Sweden.

It is  especially the Internet that has made the difference so big, but also the smartphones. We use the Internet for everything. We are booking train and plane tickets online and we book hotels in advance when we have decided to visit a city. We remember the long queues at train stations in the old days where we never really knew for sure if we were in the right queue and the many phone calls we got help from the hotel staff to call to book or rebook a flight. Hotel we often found by reading the Lonely Planet books and sometimes by following a tuktuk driver at a train station. And many kilometers we walked, but never knew for sure if we would get a room when we arrived.

 

We do not very often use our smartphones to make calls, except that we sometimes use Skype for talking to our children back in Sweden, but they can be used in so many other ways. We have downloaded  maps of India that means we will never ever get lost, the phone always knows, thanks to the GPS, where we are and help us to find out where we’re going. (We can also check that the taxi drivers are not fooling us.) They can also tell you how far we have walked every day, and as we actually strive to move as much as we can each day it spurs us on. We often choose to walk instead of taking a taxi when we get to a train station and want to go to our hotel just to get a few extra steps. Another feature that we have used many times in India is the built-in flashlight in our smartphones. Considering how many cows there are in the streets of India and how few street lamps they offer (and those that are seems to be not working a lot of the time due to electrical power cuts), it helps us not to step in too much cowshit.