I’m about to set out for Australia and New Zealand, and thanks to Steve Kropla, I’m taking my laptop computer with me. Kropla told me exactly what plugs and connectors I would need to hook up to foreign electric and telephone systems so that I could receive and send e-mail, just like at home.
I’ve never met him, but his site on the World Wide Web–www.kropla.com–holds a treasure of details, country by country, about voltage, wiring systems, phone plugs, dial tones, area codes and much else. Frequently updated, it tells where to buy whatever you need.
Kropla, 42, lives in Kingwood, Texas, a suburb of Houston. He is director of accreditation for the International Association of Drilling Contractors. He makes eight to 10 foreign trips a year, helping to organize educational conferences and accredit training schools for the oil-drilling industry.
Maintaining his “Help for World Travelers” Web site is his unpaid hobby. In a recent chat (by telephone, not by computer), he said he set up the site in August 1995 because he knew from personal experience how difficult it could be to get on-line abroad. He said he spent 10 to 20 hours a month maintaining the site, relying largely on e-mail correspondents around the world to keep him up to date. For example, he recently added area codes for China, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
Kropla is by no means alone in maintaining a travel Web site for love rather than money. Despite the rapidly increasing degree of Internet commercialism, there are still some site builders who simply want to do good by sharing their knowledge and experiences.
Example: Priscilla Sarsfield and Ken Mahlencamp of Billerica, Mass. Wife and husband in their early 40s, they’re spending most of this year in a truck-drawn trailer with two computers as they roam America to share what they see. Sarsfield, a former social studies teacher, acts as writer/researcher and Mahlencamp as photographer (his profession). Together they prepare daily electronic postcards that they put on their Web site, “Postcards From Home” (www.postcardsfrom.com).
It all began last Columbus Day, their fifth wedding anniversary, when they quit their jobs and took off to “spend their retirement money now,” as Mahlencamp says. They went first to Cadillac Mountain, Maine, and plan to end in Hawaii, after leaving their trailer in California. At this writing they were on a brief respite at home as they shopped for a new truck.
What do they hope to achieve from the adventure? “Other than realizing our lifelong dream, we hope to publish a photography book and perhaps some educational materials when we return,” Sarsfield said. “But maintaining a Web site is far more work than we realized.”
The experience of Ayse Ergurbuz and her husband, Jan Van Assche, is somewhat similar. Both 31, they live in Belgium, where Ergurbuz, originally from Turkey, is a secretary/accountant and Van Assche teaches Flemish to foreigners. They love to travel, and in 1996 spent five weeks in Iran.
After returning home, Van Assche began tinkering with the Internet and decided to build a home page.
Basically, “Ayse and Jan’s Homepage” (www.ping.be/travelspot) consists of excellent color photographs with captions, although it sometimes seems to take eons for the pictures to download. There are sections on Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Laos and Malaysia, as well as Iran. There is also a food section and links to other travel sites, all requiring frequent updating.
“It’s become part of my life now,” Van Assche said. “I can’t imagine how it would be without it–kind of strange, eh? Sometimes I really look forward to a long weekend so I can work on the site or just mess about with it and try out new things. And of course, it’s an excellent way to `meet’ people and to make friends all over the world.”
Concerning the Web site “At Home With Martin in the Wee Wee Wee Hours” (www.primenet.com/(tilde)mmathis), Martin Mathis has this to say: “I play with computers for a living and work with them in my spare time, or the other way around. I also like rock music and record collecting, travel, movies, photography, reading, playing pinball and staying up late doing it all.”
Mathis’ remarkable site reflects all these interests. By profession, he is a computer programmer/consultant, born in Switzerland 33 years ago, married to an American and living in Phoenix. He created his Web site, he said, as a technological challenge: “What would be easier than making a Web site about the things that are dear to me and I know a bit about?”
He added: “There is also a certain vanity in putting my photos, ideas, opinions on display and seeing what kind of feedback I get, how many like-minded people are out there, although I don’t mind criticism either. Satisfaction also comes from being contacted by interesting people who I otherwise would never meet or would never show an interest in what I do.”
A notable aspect of Mathis’s on-line work is “Martin’s Route 66 Gallery and Essay.” Instead of fidgeting impatiently while his excellent highway photos download, you can read an essay that he wrote about the historic road. Following the essay are links to more than a dozen other sites related to the former highway, which crossed the American Heartland from Chicago to the West Coast.
Mathis’ site was created in late 1995 and has gone through much updating and expansion. “At times I would work on it as much as three or four nights a week (and that’s until 2 or 3 a.m.), mainly when I was adding or creating new pages for the site,” he said. “A lot of time was spent on getting the details the way I wanted them.”
Halfway around the world, Sourendu Gupta is also concerned about details, mainly related to dining out. He’s a 38-year-old physicist in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), who says he eats out about twice a month. “I was tired of half-baked restaurant reviews in the city newspapers,” he said, so he started reviewing them himself on his primarily science-oriented site, “Sourendu Gupta’s Home Page” (theory.tifr.res.in/(tilde)sgupta).
Of the many links on the home page, one of them leads to Gupta’s “Guide to Bombay Restaurants.” You can reach it directly at theory.tifr.res.in/(tilde)sgupta/BoRe/index.html. To his surprise and delight, Gupta has received e-mail feedback from all over the world, from both travelers who seek help and from foreigners who once lived in Bombay and want to reminisce.
“Such mail opens a door to a Bombay of other times, as seen by other people.” he said. “I like to hear about it.”
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Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com
