Mark Espiner
Calgary Bay. Fine white sand and clear aquamarine water. A biting wind coming in off the Atlantic. A remote and beautiful spot on Scotland’s western isle of Mull. Isolated. I sat in the car parked up on the beach, looked out to America and read the decaying and rusting sign planted boldly above the high-tide mark, that had been there for what looked like 100 years.
From this spot, it declared, one of the first telegraph cables had been run from the British Isles to the United States. The beginning of telecommunications. It somehow seemed fitting that I had arrived at this spot via the Internet.
A last-minute plan to drive around Britain’s western isles for new year in 1997 had pushed me to use the World Wide Web to organise my trip rather than the phone, which seemed to shunt me at every dial to voicemail or another 10 minutes on hold. The information I needed – car hire, tourist information on the Holy Island of Iona, ferry timetables between the isles (with updates on potential industrial action) – was all readily available online. I logged on, printed what I needed and set off.
From the early days of the Internet, travel was one of the first pursuits to find its voice in the digital online community, with the exchange of information on the Internet bulletin boards on how to get from here to there with only so much cash, and what you could expect to encounter on the way.
Now, travel is the fastest-growing area of the Internet, with online booking of flights and holidays driving much of the developments in e-commerce, and many more websites offering information on anything from fabulous outdoor pursuits at www.gorp.com to sushi bars across the planet at www.sushi.to.
The bulletin boards still exist and continue to be useful, but the Web has supplanted them in terms of access to information. Internet “portals” are a good launch pad: these are websites that have collected an index of Web addresses and information for your needs. They can point you to the right source so that you don’t have to randomly scan the vast Internet landscape, racking up a huge phone bill in the process.
Nearly all the major search engine sites (Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Hotbot) have travel sections that list sub-categories for travel interests. But there are other independent alternatives which have hand- picked and rated sites.
For example, the familiar Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is a much more dynamic reference tool on the Internet than it is in printed form, features different travel topics on a regular basis. Find it at www.britannica.com.
There are many other portals relating to specific or speciality travel. For example, if South America is your goal, try Lanic which has a comprehensive list of sites to the region.
As it has grown, the Internet has become a huge library to help you plan and prepare your trip. The Rough Guides website now has some of its books online, and following its collaboration with Hotwired (the online version of the avant-garde technological magazine Wired), has built up a huge database of travel information.
Fodors will also help you tailor your travel. Answer a few questions, by clicking in check boxes on the website, and it will construct a miniguide to your destination. Time Out’s cityguides at www.timeout.com add to the free info pool of publishing brands, but there are countless other websites and ways of finding out about where you want to go.
For example, posting a note on the Lonely Planet’s website bulletin board, called the Thorn Tree, which you can access at the deja website, to ask about, say, climbing or hiking opportunities in Morocco, will yield first-hand experience and advice.
A slightly more sophisticated alternative to bulletin board suggestions and tips is Allexperts. As well as offering practical advice on subjects such as DIY and computer software, it also has travel aficionados proferring their info-wares. Choose the country or city, and the site throws up a list of “experts” plus their fields of interest. Choose one and e-mail your query, and when you have received your advice by return of electronic post you are invited to rate your adviser.
My guide, David, was an Allexpert’s expert on London, England and TS Eliot. Pretending that I was travelling to London, I asked for clues on literary walks in the city and sites in Britain that related to Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Dave’s advice? “I’ll have a ponder on what you ask,” he said, but then suggested the publisher Faber & Faber; Lloyd’s Bank, where Eliot first worked, and the church of St Magnus Martyr. Fine, although the “then there’s the Thames in general” for The Waste Land was a bit vague.
When researching the lay of the land, don’t just throw “map of Brazil” into a search engine. Instead, visit mapquest. And if it is Brazil you are after, then a knowledge of Portuguese could be handy, and forget language tapes or nightschool – the Internet has wrapped that too. Head for travlang which can give you an online language course. It doesn’t offer only the standard languages either: if it’s Bosnian, or Basque that you are after, you can learn it here, too.
Money talks all languages and Internet currency translations are readily at hand. The universal currency convertor www.xe.net/currency performs quick and accurate exchange-rate calculations.
Groundwork planning and preparation done, you don’t need to log off to buy your flight. Several company websites offer online flight booking and send you either a confirmation by e-mail or post: easyJet, Go!, ebookers and deckchair and expedia.
Hotels, too, can be booked over the Internet. But online booking here can be unreliable. Hotelguide puts details of hotels and availability on its site and purports to assist in the online booking of rooms. But when I rang one of the hotels listed the reception was completely unaware of any online booking facility.
However once you are out of the country and on the road, the powerful communication tool of the internet comes into its own. The advent of free Web- based e-mail with Hotmail, now offered by many others, including Yahoo and Excite, means that travellers can pick up and send e-mail from any Internet caf, which have opened in almost every outpost.
And with the advanced technology of eKno, which can be found at www.ekno, you can also capitalise on cheap international phonecalls, free voicemail (which can be accessed via the Internet) and make use of its innovative “travel vault”, which lets you enter all the important personal data (such as passport and insurance information) you really would not want to be without if your wallet or baggage is stolen or lost. It is stored at a password- protected website accessible from anywhere in the world but only by you.
New technology for the traveller doesn’t just mean Internet access and e-mail. There are now a host of gizmos designed to enhance the travel experience or holiday trip. A digital camera makes e- mailing pictures back home or putting them up on a website much easier. And they could be the illustrations for an online account of your travels from the road. There is a growing cult in these digital travelogues, and some of the Web techniques required to maintain a website on the road are discussed at www.madnomad.com.
Hand-held systems to locate your exact position on the planet might prove useful for those straying further from the beaten track, while for the urban traveller, hyper-trendy personal organisers have optional software for navigation and travel aids.
The Palm Pilot has one very useful add- on – Citysync is a programme which is downloadable from www.citysync.com. Once installed, it gives city maps, places to eat, and telephone numbers for accommodation.
Such advances aim to help you survive without the printed word. But being absolutely wireless and still able to log on to the wired world is also achievable. The website Road Warrior tells you how to get online without having to rely on fixed phones and Internet cafs, as well as giving advice on other aspects of life on the road.
If all of this is bamboozling or even injects a certain kind of Web-induced agoraphobia, you can always go for a virtual trip. Web cameras all over the world will show what places look like, such as Global passage.
You can even virtually visit the Mayan ruins at Palenque in Mexico at www.virtualpalenque.com. The photographs here are 360-degree interactive navigable views supported by some pacy archaeological notes.
The Web is driven by information, and with its ease of communication it can really deliver independence and freedom. So if you really want to find a remote haven and enjoy the illusion of the lonely planet, then getting connected to the Internet community is a first step that is well worth taking.