I’ve never experienced internet as bad and as unpredictable as here in Kampot Cambodia, anywhere ( this was before our last trip to India!). OK, it was really bad in our guest house in Phnom Penh, but we left after 1 night so it didn’t really have time to get to me, but Kampot, on the river, is a nice place, we wanted to stick around for a bit. The internet in Battambang was superb, so it’s not a Cambodia thing, I’m not dissing their internet.
In the olden days, we travelled without internet ( I mean, totally without, that long ago) and it was fine, we had a RTW flight ticket booked and we’d done all our research, attained necessary visas and knew what we were doing before we left home. Including when we’d be coming back. We were very happy to wing it with accommodation, as we are now, so same same there. These days the way we travel is different, it’s more on-the-fly .
We plan to cross into Vietnam in the next week or so, maybe, this means finding out:
The best way to get visas and what they’ll cost.
Do we need to pay for visas for the kids? (yes, but had we not done this research before entering Cambodia we would have fallen for the scam)
See if it’s possible or cheaper to fly in from Phnom Penh to get a simpler visa-on-arrival. (no)
Decide if we want a 1 month visa at $60 each or a 3 month visa at $95 each. This decision will be based on factors like, cost of accommodation, food and transport. We already know Vietnam and we know we like it, but prices must have changed in the last 15 years.
We need to look at flight prices out of Hanoi, compare them with flight prices out of Saigon and decide a. where we’ll fly out and b. where we’ll go next. We need to at least have some idea of where we’re going. ( then start the visa thing again)
All this has to be done online and it takes hours. I hate it but it’s a fact of life. Dear God I miss the days of just checking in the Lonely Planet!
I also have an online business to run, all be it at a very leisurely sort of intensity. At the moment I can’t even check my email, which is why I’m writing this post, WordPress will open but my email and social media accounts won’t.
The online learning programmes the kids sometimes use, forget about them. The kids favourite games, gone. Their current pet project, making videos for You Tube, extremely limited, the first one took 4 days to upload. The new Kindle books they want me to download, impossible.
My support network of online friends, unreachable.
So forgive me for whinging about bad internet and don’t tell me I should be out enjoying Cambodia, not looking at screens. This is our life, not a holiday, and the internet is a big part of that. We have days we fill with doing Cambodia stuff and days that remain empty for normal life stuff.
It was so much easier in the olden days.
So I’ll just have another Angkor beer and look at the sunset while the kids play with their friends, I guess.
Vietnam will have to wait, we seem to be having a forced holiday.
UPDATE: We decided not to go to Vietnam in the end. We came back overland by taxi and bus to Bangkok and we’re heading to India instead, just to keep things interesting!
Ken Weary says
I had a similar experience recently in Guatemala. It can be so frustrating when you have to unplug from the Internet and are not prepared in advance. Love your site.
Kate says
Yuck I feel your pain as I work online too and so continue while traveling. We stayed at the Riverside in Kampot and had good internet — nice Australian owner too.
We went overland from Kampot to HCMC and got our visas in PP from a hotel/travel agent (more expensive but we didn’t want to trek to the embassy all day). It was a bit nerve wracking going overland last year as they had closed the border because of the Chinese issue and setting factories on fire in the Delta area. But the day we left the borders opened and there was no one there! We walked thru and met our minvan on the other side. A “doctor” had us sign a form saying we were healthy and he had a thermometer but didn’t use it. We paid him a small amount for that health check up:) Other than that an easy drive/
We had explored going by bus but with the border closings we heard they were rerouting further up and sometimes it took 10-12 hours with no toilets on board etc. So we chose to hire a private van for the 5 of us and I don’t remember it being very expensive overall (plus fast and we could stop whenever needed:)
emulsifiedfamily says
Oh no!! How frustrating!! Hope the next location is better for that! 🙂
Talitha says
Hello there! (don(t know when you’ll read this though?!)
sounds frustrating … I agree that not having internet-access complicates life. We experienced it a bit in Swaziland, and it’s like eating soup with a fork : not impossible but very uncomfortable!
Please keep on whining, it makes me feel a little less jealous of your travels (behind my super-fast internet-connected laptop!) ;-))
I’d love to hear your boys about their cambodian friends. Maybe they can make a video together?
Lift up your spirits, Alyson, things will work out … eventually!
Talitha