Packing with the intention of travelling abroad is never easy, especially when trying to figure out what gadgets, wires, accessories or batteries you would have to bring along for the trip. I myself recently experienced this, having just gotten back from a pleasant two week trip to Malaysia to help an organisation called World Scholar’s Cup organise their Global Round. I say pleasant but in reality, when it came to anything that ran off electricity, it was chaotic.
Almost from the get go, after touching down in Malaysia and heading towards the apartment where I and a few friends would be staying at, things started going wrong. I didn’t have a local SIM, the one destined for my use was at the apartment I was heading for. Unfortunately, this resulted in my friends and I being not being let into our place since none of us could access the internet to contact our host, or call her. Our very expensive phones had suddenly been relegated to heavy paperweights. The ensuing chaos was comical. I myself set out on a walk, trying to come across some unsecured WiFi hotspot to use while navigating signs in an unfamiliar language. Luckily for my friends and I, a kindly local offered his old Nokia to us; it may as well have been a lifeline from God, and we shortly managed to get ourselves settled in.
Lesson learned: buy your SIM from the airport or utilise the free WiFi offered to the max!
Alas, that was not the end of my technological woes. I had dedicated an entire compartment of my backpack to chargers, cables and the like, I had three different cables to charge my single Nexus 5. Confidant that I’d prepared enough in this area, I was rewarded in finding out that wall sockets here used the same standard as in Dubai. Unfortunately for my roommate, the same was not true for him: he’d come from Bangkok and his plugs were more useful as table top adornments than for charging his phone. Luckily for him, he had a backup plan: a universal adapter, something which when he showed me, I instantly felt jealous about and had to use the utmost restraint to not pinch off him.
Lesson learned: a universal adapter is a friend when all else fails.
A few days into my trip, my phone started developing a rather annoying habit of restarting itself without my permission. No matter how I asked, threatened or begged, my Nexus refused to listen to me and after going on a spree of restarts, it refused to boot up. I was in a foreign country without a working smartphone, albeit with friends who had a variety of smartphones, but I felt very naked under the circumstances. Again fortune was on my side. I wasn’t the only person who was asked to come help WSC, one of the other volunteers was a tech wizard by the name of Kevin. He instantly analysed my phone while I waited anxiously on the side, like a parent doting over a sick child. The diagnosis was depressing. The power button was wedged and the ribbon connecting it to the motherboard was frayed. While it was beyond his power to repair it, he did know of a shop which could. Thus we set off on a journey that would be sung about for many centuries. After a gruelling 10 minute walk in the air conditioned Levitated Pedestrian Crossing we made it. This shop was located in a mall called Low Yat, in all but name it perfectly resembled Computer Plaza in Bur Dubai. To be honest I was a tad bit nervous about handing my phone off to a person in a foreign country. My fears were quenched when the person I was handing it over to didn’t sport a trenchcoat as my imagination had been showing me until that moment.
Lesson learned: pack a Kevin with you for all technological problems. That or do your research on the most reliable gadget repair stores local to your place of stay.
Perhaps the only thing that went right on my trip was my powerbank. About the size of my phone, and purchased a few days before I set off, it had the general look off an iPhone: it sported a single button, though it did lack a screen. It may have taken over 6 hours to top off the battery in it, but once it did it had enough juice in it to charge my Nexus 5 twice and then some. I confess, I grew so fond of it that in the day when my phone was sent off for repair I would carry my powerbank around in my pocket for no other reason than to take it out occasionally and caress it when no one was looking.
Lesson learned: Powerbanks aren’t so different from my Nexus 5
