Thanks to Dushaun Flickr
Here is a list of gadgets we took on our trip that proved indispensible. And just to be balanced I’ve included a couple that we could have survived without.
A She-Wee. Yes, it is a pee-pee gadget for girls so we can pee standing up. It is all just one step closer to true equality. And it really did help Katie for the first couple of weeks while she built up her squatting confidence. It was also good for those times when you really don’t want to be squatting down low to a porcelain hole in the ground that smells like it has several rotting animals in it’s depth; you can stand up holding, or clenching the she-wee if you really want to be clever, and hold your nose with your free hand.
A Mooncup. In some places it is called a Diva Cup. The idea is for less than $25 you can be done with tampons and pads and just carry this little rubber cup in it’s cotton and ribbon pouch around with you instead. I know people swear by it, I did take the time to read the testimonials before rushing around London trying to find a stockist that still had one like a crazy woman with only 36 hours to spare before our trip started, convinced that I absolutely essentially had to have it or all would be ruined. It worked fine for the first month; it has been touch and go since then and I don’t trust it completely.
A Nintendo DS. I had originally bought this for myself a long time before the trip so I could play some game that is supposed to test your mental age and keep it young in the brief hope that it would improve my mental capacity, and Nicole Kidman really did look so beautiful in those adverts. However, Katie quickly adopted it for herself and my brain enhancing game got lost amongst The Little Mermaid and Super Mario and Cooking Mama. However it has been a godsend on long journeys.
Asus Eee-PC. We left England with one of these and it lasted nearly six months and got us as far as Cambodia where it ceased to work. It happened at the worst possible time, for the first time in 5.5 months we had arrived at a guesthouse that had wifi, yet we couldn’t take advantage of it. We replaced the dearly departed Eee-PC for an Acer later on when we returned to Bangkok.
My trusty iPod, the first one I ever owned also gave up the ghost at the same time as the Asus Eee-PC. It had been wavering when we had left England but nothing serious enough to make me go rushing out to buy a new one while I was feeling fluttery about how much I had already spent on gear, insurance and vaccines. I was optimistic that iPod would last the distance, because it couldn’t walk out on me halfway through the trip. It just couldn’t. But it did. About six weeks into the trip, in Istanbul, my most faithful gadget, the one I couldn’t bear to live without went into some kind of seizure and it took a lot of panicking and not just a few cigarettes and positive affirmations for me to hit on the idea of wanting to see if I could fix it by sticking my Swiss Army knife into it. It did. For a while. It had a few minor seizures after that, but after sticking my knife into it’s side and wiggling it about, it got a second, third and fourth wind. But no amount of stabbing, wiggling or downright taking it apart and putting it back together would resuscitate it in Siem Reap, so I did the only thing I could. I threw away my white but now graying iPod with my name perfectly beautifully engraved on the back, and went straight out that afternoon in a breathless panic asking random tuk-tuk drivers ‘have you seen an Apple store?’ in the same kind of way that grief stricken parents of missing backpackers talk as they desperately thrust a picture of the missing loved one at passersby. With Katie barely keeping up at my heels I saw a shop that sold iPods. Yes! Four hours later I was the proud new owner of a black iPod that had most of my old library’s worth of music transferred over, fickly disregarding it’s white brother next to it on the shelf.
A lightweight mac-in-a-pac. I had this from years ago, it was originally bought for our backpacking trip in ‘02. It squashed down flat and had a strap that could be attached to my daypack or a belt. I didn’t need it often but when I did it came in really useful. That was until I left it on a boat in Laos.
An all in one adaptor. Instead of having to carry lots of different adaptors or go straight out and track one down whenever entering a new country, even though it was bulky, my all in one worked a treat.
A torch and compass. The torch got used a couple of times in the space of the first year, the compass not at all.
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Tags: Gadgets, travel tips
