Lately, there’s been a lot of talk around smart travel solutions. What happens when you really don’t have access to consistent electricity, fear of power surges, etc? Do you have to lug your computer around to charge your phone? With smart phones with increasingly better cameras is there even a reason to bring a camera?
I recently took a trip through the Thai jungle with only a backpack, carrying a netbook a couple changes of clothes, my Galaxy S3 phone and a Nikon DSLR. For the entire 2.5 weeks, I was stuck in torrential rain, inconsistent electricity, and far away from first world conveniences.
Too afraid to damage my Nikon, I relied 95% of the time on my Galaxy S3 to take photos, as it was smaller, easier to keep dry and I was less afraid of minor water damage. The phone was also much less precocious allowing me to take great natural images of villagers without disrupting their daily life. As an amateur photographer more interested in living the culture than the images, it was perfect.
The hardest part was keeping the battery charged the whole time. Over my many trips, I’ve found 2 rather elegant battery solutions. The first is making use of a couple Gorilla extended batteries. The batteries last at least twice as long as regular batteries and traveling with a back-up and wall charger means that whenever I’m in a café, a hostel or a hotel, I just plug one into the wall to charge as backup while the other is chillin’ in my phone. This has worked awesome for me especially traveling through urban areas using my primary smart phone.
Often when I travel to developing countries, I use a cheap travel phone for calling and my smart phone for internet and camera capabilities. For this reason, I like using power banks or external batteries. I can connect it to any device, phone or tablet and can recharge the average phone battery 3 times.
On my Thailand trip, this was my solution. I actually took the smallest external battery, the Uhuru 2800mAh, mostly because it was light, and a wall charger. Whenever I had the chance, I’d recharge the external battery in preparation for the 24-48 hours of no electricity. Blindly following a village leader trekking from one place to the next, I was worried about a lot of things: food, malaria, where I’d sleep, broken shoes, wet clothes etc. but it was nice not worrying about whether or not I’d have enough battery to capture awesome moments like these.
Tricia
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