Whether you are travelling for two weeks or twelve months…

You’ll want to either stay in touch, research and book ahead. And save and share your experiences and memories. Backpacking is an art and a science. Where a balance between need, want and couldn’t do without often clash with space, weight and risk. Technology can help (or hinder) this – here’s how I believe it can help.

Staying in touch

Sharing experiences with friends and family left behind is one of joys of travel. After all, they weren’t there to enjoy these with you. So for any number of reasons (best kept to yourself), you will want a device to use email, Facebook, Whatapp, Snapchat, Wechat and/or Weboo.

Many hostels, hotels and backpackers offer free or paid internet access by Wifi. These are often via a much-in-demand older computer and long queues behind seemingly unaware surfers and Skypers.

A smart phone is an obvious choice, after all it also gives you a safety line if needed. However unless you stay on WIFI, you’ll need either a good roaming package including data or a local SIM voice and data pack. There are data only packs available – but at a cost. And it’s this cost, among other factors, which may lead to the phone being turned off and relegated to the bottom of the pack.

Take your own laptop but leave the iPad at home

Okay, it’s counter-intuitive when thinking about minimising the weight of your backpack.

But in my view, the best option is a small laptop/net book or tablet/keyboard combo with hard storage and ports. Both elements which are (unfortunately) missing on the Ipad.

For longer emails either updating family and friends or planning/booking accommodation and transport, a keyboard and mouse are far preferable. Yes, you can get Bluetooth keyboards for the Ipad. However the second/major benefit of a laptop/netbook over an Ipad is being able to upload (on mass) photos. Boy, there’ll be a lot of them! I came back with 30,000+ after 6 months/17 countries!

Backing up these irreplaceable memories is important, and laptop/netbooks do offer adequate storage.

Expect it to get damaged or stolen

You’ll either be ambivalently annoyed or pleasantly surprised. There are plenty of cheaper laptops on the market. Of key importance is size and weight both of the laptop and accessories (power packs/portable DVD player if separate). Netbooks were very popular a few years ago but tablets have taken over, not always for the better.

The hybrids are a good option. Make sure they have adequate storage and the functionality to connect a back-up drive. However the cheaper, the better. You are less likely to worry about it being stolen, especially if photos have been saved elsewhere. And really you don’t need it for much more. Hopefully you’re not going use it for gaming or anything more complex than blogging.

Look at these

Here are some options on Amazon that are lightweight and under £200

Definitely take a portable storage drive as well as a secondary backup. And ask your travelling partner to carry these (opting for lighter version of course). And when Wifi is good, try to back up to a cloud based service such as Dropbox, Google Cloud or Onedrive.  There’s many other alternatives although for decent capacity, you may need to buy a subscription.

And here is a selection of external drives available on Amazon that are portable

Whether a long or short trip, sharing your experiences is enjoyable and the right technology can make this fun.