Communication

My apologies, I promised a few more "Onbekommerd" posts but now that we are in London for a few days, the rythm of the past 160 days is broken and I simply have not thought enough about posting.

When we set off on our first our 'Onbekommerd' trip, in April 2010, we tried to keep in touch with family (parents, children and siblings). We used the laptop, with a GSM 'dongle' to connect to the Internet when there was no WiFi available and sent emails.

That worked, but we wondered if they really all wanted emails that often and also some friends wanted to know what we were up to. So at the start of the 2011 trip, we decided to start a blog.
That way, we can send the link to the blog to family and friends and they can decide for themselves if and when they want to look at it. We still used the laptop / dongle / WiFi combination to connect, but it was getting a bit more tricky when we left the Netherlands and went to the German 'Wadden' Islands. The problem was that the dongle only works with the Dutch SIM card and when you use this in Germany, you are 'data roaming', which is very expensive. And WiFi is not as readily available as we would like, plus it is often unreliable  and / or quite costly. So although the blog was by all accounts a good idea, but we were not quite there yet.

But later in 2011, whilst in London we had an opportunity to get better aquainted with the iPad and there was the solution! So in December we bought one of those things. We now use an iPad with 3G capabilities, and by now have no fewer than 5 SIM cards for it, one each for South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. They are relatively inexpensive and if you get the right type of data bundles the use is affordable as well.
Of course there are still frustrations, as for each card, there are different methods to get the data 'on to the card'. Even when the service providers are supposedly the same company (Vodafone in SA, UK and Netherlands), there is absolutely no commonality in loading the data. Usually you end up having to find an outlet of the specific service provider to get it done. That is not easy as there are none in the small places we go to, so we need to plan our 'entry' into each country in such a way that we hit a biggish place early on. Or you have to take the bus to the nearest town (like to Norden from Greetsiel). The only exception is Vodafone UK, where the SIM has an application which allows you to buy data 'from the comfort of your boat'.

Here is the iPad:

Of course, apart from doing the blogpost (incidentally, we use an 'app' called "Blogpress" for that, which makes it extremely easy to do), the iPad is also very useful for getting weather forecats, seeing the news and receiving and sending emails. And last but not least, it has got Skype installed which makes it possible to talk with the 'home front' from time to time, someting we always look forward to!

Apart from the iPad, we have a mobile phone with a Dutch number, which we use on a roaming basis so we can be reached in case of an emergency.

Tomorrow we fly back from London to Cape Town, I'll try to do the 'navigation' post which I also promised some time during the weekend.