funtotravel.info: How times change. - 2002 vs 2012.

Although I took my first trip away from the parents in the heady summer of 1998, from London to the mysterious wilds of Italy and Greece, the fact that the whole thing was organised by said parents (who although they wouldn’t be coming insisted on planning most of the finer details) means that we can’t count it.

No, this intrepid explorer took his first trip as a fully fledged backpacker with his younger brother in April of 2002, in the midst of a post-university ‘what the hell am I going to do next?’ gap-year. We journeyed around Western Europe on hastily purchased Interrail tickets taking in the sights, smells, sounds, wine and women (ok, lots of the former and not so much of the latter…) of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. My brother and I met up last weekend for the Christening of funtotravel.info junior, and found ourselves reminiscing on the trip – good times and bad.

What struck us was quite how different the whole experience was then to how it would be now in terms of booking, planning, meeting people, what to do in minutes of boredom and recording your experiences on the way round. It’s hard to imagine a time when the internet was still in its infancy, but it does provide us with an interesting basis for comparison, given that the funtotravel.info family have just booked a trip back to Thailand for a spot of island-hopping in March/April.

	2002	2012
Planning the trip	Using Lonely Planet/Let’s Go guidebooks bought or borrowed from the local library	Using funtotravel.info (obviously!), reading other travellers’ blogs, reading the Lonely Planet website and the Thorntree forum etc. We still bought the relevant guidebook though!
Booking the trip	Through our local STA Travel shop/other cheap travel agency. Interrail tickets were bought in person.	Online: Book flights/hotels using price comparison sights like Kayak/STA Travel/Expedia. All booked online using a secure connection.
Booking accommodation in advance	Either calling the hostels/hotel listed in the guidebook and attempting to bluff our way in that language or going to the local tourist office in the town in question and asking them to find us a room.	Online: Through a website like hostelbookers, hostelworld, sawasdee.com etc
What technology would you take with you	Discman/mini disc player, 35mm camera, and….ummm….that’s it.	Ipod, possibly tablet/laptop, smartphone, digital camera, kindle etc
What did you do on long train or bus journeys?	Read a book, listen to a CD, talk to people	Read a book on the Kindle, write a blog on the laptop, play games on the iPad, look at the pictures I have already taken on the camera etc, watch a movie.
How do you meet people on the road?	Walk up to them, talk to them, leave messages on hostel noticeboards at a push	Hook up on facebook, though twitter or on funtotravel.info!
How do you keep a record of what you’ve been up to ?	Write a diary, on paper, using a pen	Write a blog on my laptop
How did you communicate with home?	Send postcards, call home from a payphone, if you’re feeling daring and trust the dial-up connection in the dodgy looking internet café, then write a group email.	Call on skype using laptop/tablet or an internet café, message people on facebook, write some emails, write a blog. All online.

All of the above provides a stark and very amusing indication of just how much independent travel has changed. The use of the word ‘independent’ is a very pertinent one – the changes in the world of technology mean that  travellers are ‘alone’ less than ever before even if they are, strictly speaking, travelling on their own. The world is covered in wifi spots and high-speed internet cafes, meaning that in a bafflingly large percentage of places that you would ever want to travel, you can be online talking, face-timing, sharing photos, downloading music and movies etc.

Back in the pre-internet days, if you were stuck down in the common room of your hostel in the back-end of nowhere, people tended to be more talkative. The need to communicate in person with your fellow travellers was naturally far greater when you couldn’t fall back on the fact that you could whip out your smartphone to boast about where you are, play Angry Birds on your iPad, listen to one of 20,000 songs on your ipad or even watch a movie on your phone. Travel seemed more sociable back then and created a real sense of camaraderie amongst travellers – if you were on the road you knew it, and the only real way to pick up tips on whether the train was running between Kunming and Hanoi, or whether you needed a visa to get into Cambodia was to ask around the people staying in your guest house. Call us old romantics, but travel the ‘old way’ seemed more open and more in tune with the spirit of discovery. The world has definitely shrunk…

Having said that, we are huge hypocrites. We have booked our trip to Thailand online, fully intend to keep up this blog when we are away, have emailed queries to potential hotel about baby cribs etc and will no doubt be boasting on facebook and twitter about how great our holiday is on the way round. I guess convenience can be a wonderful thing, even if it does make you an unsociable old bastard!

Let us know what you think about the relationship between technology and travel.

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