Getting Connected With the Itinerant Cafe Society

We surfed in Fiji, New Zealand and India. We thought it would be tricky surfing in Nepal, but even here we found easy access to the Internet.

Circling the globe these days also involves navigating the World Wide Web. Cyber cafes along the tourist trail are now as common as hotels and souvenir stands. Aside from altering the look of the landscape, they are changing the way people travel.

Every long-term traveler we’ve met on this trip admits to breaking up the journey with at least the occasional session online. The typical traveler, Andrea and me included, ducks into an Internet shop once or twice a week. Most Net time is spent writing and reading e-mail, using one of the free e-mail providers such as Hotmail or Yahoo.

Besides e-mail, we have surfed the Net while abroad to make hotel reservations, research travel medicine questions and monitor activity on our credit card and bank accounts. Andrea has browsed the Web to buy birthday gifts, and I file this weekly column electronically, communicating with my editor via e-mail.

The world got wired in a hurry. When I last traveled at length five years ago, I did not see a single cyber cafe. Vagabonds sipped coffee in real cafes then, jotting stacks of postcards they dropped into dubious national mail systems, uncertain when and whether they would reach the intended recipients.

Today such folks are likely to be hunched over a keyboard in some side-street stall, firing their wish-you-were-heres around the planet instantaneously with a mouse click. I still see postcard vendors, but they look mighty bored.

Connection costs and speeds vary by country. Swift access to the Internet in New Zealand runs about $5 an hour. Some Japanese tourists in Christchurch thought this affordable enough to play video games online. It was not uncommon to see storefronts with 30 computers--and a body parked at each one. Modems for hire were everywhere we turned. We even spotted a coin-operated computer in a Subway sandwich shop in the town of Nelson.

Time online can be had for as little as 75 cents an hour in India, but the overburdened phone system means frequent crashes. The Indians make up for the poor quality with quantity. It seems everybody’s brother is an Internet entrepreneur, even if his cyber cafe amounts to a PC and modem wedged into the corner of a sundries shop.

In Udaipur, a storekeeper gave me his seat behind the counter so I could log onto a computer that sat beneath shelves of cigarettes, film and toilet paper. In Jaisalmer, I wrote a column on a PC in somebody’s living room while the boy of the house watched cricket on TV and Andrea entertained his baby sister on the couch.

The cyber surprise of the journey is Nepal. This tiny mountain kingdom lacks a freeway yet offers abundant onramps to the information superhighway. Signs for Internet shops dominate streets in the tourist section of the capital. The hardware and connections rival those found in cyber cafes in the States. Competition is so fierce that online rates have plummeted in the last two years, from $16 an hour to less than $1 an hour.

The advent of e-mail means that the world traveler is no longer disconnected from home. Nervous relatives can send reminders to be careful, co-workers can pass along office gossip and friends can provide laughs. We have met fellow wanderers who bemoan this electronic tether, but they still line up to log on.

Andrea and I send a monthly electronic update on our travels to about 60 relatives and friends, and many of them e-mail us back. Without the Internet, it would have been months before we heard that my sister, Debbie, had been accepted to medical school. Bill, our tenant, would be unable to convey the happy state of our pets. (Maya, our dog, has been sprayed by a skunk only once this year, a sharp decline from the same period a year ago.) And when we sent a message to our friend Ron DeLyons of Cincinnati, lamenting the alarming travel conditions in India, he slayed us with his brief reply: “When do you dial 911?”

It’s funny how technology that was not widely available to travelers a few years ago now seems indispensable. At several points on this trip, I’ve logged on to retrieve information I easily did without on previous journeys. So far, I’ve gone online to scan headlines, check frequent-flier mileage, get sports scores and find match results at my local golf club.

My electronic trivial pursuits reached a nadir two months ago in New Zealand, where a familiar song got stuck in my head during a hike. Prompted by the sublime scenery I passed, the lyrics “It’s all too beautiful” kept echoing in my mind. I did not know the name of the song or the band that recorded it, nor did any of the other people I pestered along the trail with my humming.

In another era, the repetitious refrain might still be bouncing around my noggin. But this is the year 2000. I went online, plugged the lyrics into the Metacrawler search engine and quickly learned that the tune tormenting me was “Itchycoo Park” by the ‘60s group Small Faces. The answer came as a relief, and I’m happy to know that if another song gets lodged in my brain in Vietnam, Turkey or anyplace else down the road, a cyber cafe awaits me.

NEXT WEEK: Himalaya hiking.

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Miss a Wander Year installment? The entire series can be found on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/travel/wander.