In Queenstown, New Zealand, I thought my luck had run out. I had just checked into Room 108 at the Parkroyal Hotel and wanted to hook up my laptop computer to send and receive e-mail. Normally I would have detached the telephone from its wall jack and plugged in my computer modem in its place. In Room 108, however, the telephone was hard-wired, which meant that its main wire ran directly into the telephone at one end and the wall at the other and could not easily be disconnected.
If I had been an electronic junkie, I might have felt challenged but by no means defeated. At an Internet site called “Help for World Travelers” (www.kropla.com), Steve Kropla, its creator, addresses problems such as mine. He suggests using an acoustic coupler — a device whose name alone intimidates me. He also suggests “basic wiretapping,” minor electronic surgery that is technologically beyond me. Therefore, feeling insecure and discouraged, I sought help at the hotel’s front desk.
There I learned a basic lesson about traveling with a computer: Be sure to request a hotel room that has appropriate connections. At the Parkroyal, as at many other hotels, some rooms do and some don’t. Sometimes those that do cost extra, but not always. You may luckily get a “do” without requesting it, but you can’t count on it.
The Parkroyal wasn’t able to switch my room, but I was invited to plug in my computer at the concierge desk in the lobby. I sat there for half an hour, wading through a ton of e-mail trash and a few important messages that had accumulated in the three days since I had last signed on. Every few minutes, however, I was interrupted by someone who thought I was the concierge and who wanted advice on local sightseeing or where to dine that night.
I lugged my six-pound laptop and accessories around New Zealand and Australia, with stopovers in London, for nearly five weeks. I carried a bag of plugs and adapters that I hoped would fit virtually any kind of electric or telephone connection, which in each country is different. Such gadgets are readily available from electronic stores in the United States and abroad or can be bought online (see www.kropla.com/sources.htm). They served me well, except where the phones were hard-wired.
I learned a lot on my electronically enhanced odyssey. For example:
– It’s essential that your computer can be used over a wide range of voltage levels and at different electrical frequencies. Most current laptops are okay: They’re designed for alternating current, can accept anywhere from 120 volts to 240 volts and can operate at 50 or 60 cycles per second.
– Before leaving home, it’s essential to know how to go on-line from wherever you may be. I connected through America Online, which has local phone numbers throughout the world. I carried a list of all those I might need, so in most major cities I could go on-line with just a local call.
– International connections usually carry an hourly surcharge, however, which ranges from $3.95 to $42 with AOL. That’s in addition to the normal charge for accessing AOL or any other Internet service provider.
– In relatively few foreign hotels are local calls free. Because I used the concierge’s line at the Queenstown Parkroyal, not the one in my room, I wasn’t charged to connect to AOL. For local calls from guest rooms, however, some hotels charge a flat rate, regardless of how long you’re on-line; others charge by the length of the call. At the Powerhouse Hotel in Brisbane, Australia, a 20-minute call cost only 65 Australian cents (about 44 U.S. cents), while at the Chesterfield Hotel in London a similar call cost 7.15 British pounds ($11.94). Also, if there is no local access number and the connecting call is long distance, the charges can multiply.
– Because of the potential expense, it’s usually important to keep each on-line session to a minimum. Therefore, I went on-line only every third day of my travels. Each time I quickly scanned the list of incoming messages and deleted, without reading, all that did not seem essential. If I decided to read any message of more than three paragraphs, I first saved it to disk so that I could digest it at will off-line.
– You may be able to avoid hotel charges by hooking up your laptop in an airport lounge, if you qualify for admission. Or it may be feasible to leave your laptop at home and use the electronic work stations in many airports and hotel lobbies or the computers in cyber cafes. Be cautious, however; such alternatives may not be where you need them or may not provide access to your regular e-mail address.
With all these caveats, you may wonder whether toting a computer around the world is really worth it. To that I say a resounding “Yes!”
There’s nothing like keeping in instant touch when you’re half a world away, just back from the beach on a torrid summer afternoon when it’s shortly before an icy winter dawn at home. Instead of mailing postcards that might take weeks to reach their destinations, my wife and I delighted our relatives and close friends by telling them by e-mail what we had done that day. If I had had a digital camera and appropriate accessories, we might even have sent them pictures. But more important, we kept in close touch with a daughter-in-law who was imminently expecting her first child, and I responded to several messages from readers of this column.
Because of the expense, I didn’t spend much time surfing the Internet, but I did keep up with the on-line version of my favorite daily newspaper. Not only did it satisfy my appetite for local political, economic, social and sporting news, but it also kept me abreast of the latest Clinton-Lewinsky developments, a subject that evoked minimal public interest in New Zealand.
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Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com
