Keeping In Touch

While travelling obviously you want to keep in touch with everyone back home. With the advent of modern technology, the odd postcard every now and then has gone the way of the dodo. Nowadays with smartphones, social networking, and VoIP technology, people want to know what and how you’re doing at a moment’s notice. This is great in terms of keeping in touch and beating homesickness, but at the same time takes away from the whole “getting away from it all” point that a vacation/travelling is. Anyways, having been away so long I’ve gone through a lot of different mediums in terms of keeping in touch with friends and family. Today I’ll cover a few of these mediums: Email, Post, Google, Facebook and Skype. These are probably the easiest and most usable tools when travelling.

Post:

This is the most old-school way of keeping in touch - but still a nice touch. Depending on where you are in the world, post can be sometimes unreliable. So far in Korea, Australia, and the US, service has been pretty good. Here in Australia it takes a little while for my postcards or mail to get to me from Canada (usually 2 weeks). I was surprised as one of my birthday packages tool 6 days to get here to Australia, now THAT’S service!

Email:

This is one of my most hated of all mediums, and always has been. In previous travels I used to use e-mail but the problem comes when you have so many people to write back to, and you’re pretty much writing the same damn thing over and over. Nothing pisses me off more than an e-mail (or even facebook, or whatever message) that just basically says “How’s your trip? How’s Australia? Do you like it?” SERIOUSLY! I don’t mind the odd one coming in from someone who’s out of the loop, or when I’m someplace remote. Otherwise, I have pictures up, a whole blog, twitter, and a life/job out here. You shouldn’t need to ask... Doing custom emails is painfully time consuming! I am guilty of using cookie-cutter emails (since I repeat myself so much in them) .

Google Suite (Chat, Plus, etc.):

While I’m a big fan of Google products, in terms of chat and social networking they have a lot of work to do. Google Chat is somewhat of an alternative to facebook messenger but has a tendency to be unreliable. Messages sometimes don’t get sent, don’t get received. Google Plus was an interesting idea, but nobody uses it. As well the option of having a Google Hangout hosting a videochat with many people at the same time is great, but sadly the video quality isn’t up to par to make me switch from other VoIP providers.

Facebook:

This is the default social network, and the way I predominately keep in touch with everyone. Here you can post your pictures, tag yourself, give status updates, chat, and send messages (e-mail style). I can’t complain really as it is a valuable tool to share my pics and adventures. For the most part this is probably one of the most reliable chat tools as I’ve never had any issues with messages not being sent/received and you can usually see if it’s been read or not. Apart from that, you probably already know everything there is about facebook.

Skype/VoIP:

This is quite possibly the best way to keep in touch in terms of voice/video chat. I for the most part use Skype as it provides the best quality in both video and voice chat. Its network is fairly consistent with very few blips. Best of all it’s free to use if both of you are using it. You can also use Skype to call actual phone numbers for a fee, but usually these are minimal. You can also use Skype from your smartphone - just be sure to check your data usage if you’re not on wifi. So before you leave, be sure to get everyone up and running on Skype for free voice/videochat. If they’re too lazy to get it, well you can pay to call them on the phone and nag them about it.