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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

I would say maybe vacation without a phone. If you are sitting on a lounge chair by a pool, I think it might be nice to force yourself to get a bit bored.

But don't travel without a phone. A smart phone, more than any other thing let's you travel further off the beaten path and have interactions with people you don't share a language or any other understanding with.

I've traveled extensively on motorcycle and there have been so many times where I'll be in the middle of a mountain in the middle of no where and the thought has popped into my head "this would be crazy if not suicidal if I didn't have the combination of maps, translate and some basic search".

Even 20 years ago, you would have needed survival and language training to do things that anybody can do today because of a smart phone.

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So what happens when you’re in the middle of a mountain and your phone breaks? Or you’re in some foreign country and it gets stolen? That’s not to say that the phone doesn’t help a lot, but I think a lot of people fail to consider their backup plans should the phone become unavailable for some reason. It might be good to travel without it once or twice just to exercise those fallback options.

I would walk my creditcard toa store and buy a new one.

It's a back up. I planned my route at the beginning of the day. That alone is worth it's weight in gold even if the phone breaks or get's lost mid day. If so I'd buy an overpriced burner phone at the next town (although in years of traveling I've never just lost or broken a phone at a critical time).

I would never have made it to many of the places where I was at without a phone or at least some other GPS

Exercising backups isn’t always a good idea. Testing your UPS? Yes. Testing your emergency parachute? No. I don’t see a pressing need to test my no-phone backups, and a lot of downside.

What downsides?

Wasting time and money getting lost, getting separated from companions with no way to find them again, significantly reduced transportation options, having some sort of emergency and having a much tougher time dealing with it.

I have a decent amount of experience traveling internationally before the smartphone era. It was mostly fine, but with the smartphone is way better. And I had a couple of difficult unforeseen circumstances that would have been made far easier with one.

Why to you need to travel without to test your backup plan?

Just because my wallet could be stolen doesn't mean I am going to try traveling without a wallet.

In a lot of countries, a smart phone is necessary. It is how things are paid for, how metro schedules are shown, how tickets are scanned, it is how local taxis[1] are hailed.

When I am abroad, my phone lets me real time translate menus! I recently had a conversation with a 5 year old kid in China mediated by near-real time phone translation.

And while I'll agree knowing how to get around nature w/o a phone is a very useful skill to have, once I am back in the metro, knowing how to use a smartphone within the local ecosystem is just as much a skill for a traveler as anything else.

[1] Well the local Uber equivalent.

> When I am abroad, my phone lets me real time translate menus!

The first time I traveled abroad (years before smartphones became commonplace), my boss insisted I pay attention to every conversation, even when I didn't speak the language. It turns out, in a lot of languages, there are a lot of unexpected cognates. And you can pick up quite a few words in very little time just by listening.

You say your phone helped you carry on a conversation in a language you didn't speak, but have you tried it without the phone? It works better than you probably think. Imagine you saw your favorite movie for the first time in a foreign language. Don't you think you could figure out most of it from visuals, emotions, and context? In my experience, you can understand about 80% of a movie without speaking a word of the language. 5 year olds don't know that many words, anyway!

Also: menus? If I'm traveling somewhere where I can't read the menu, I probably don't know what any of the food is, either, so I'll eat anything. Trying new and unknown native customs is the whole point of traveling.

This all sounds to me like people who say "I need GPS or I'll never find anything!" Actually, my friends who don't use GPS got lost the first few times, but now know the city better than anyone. My friends who use GPS every time, OTOH, still don't know where anything is.

> but have you tried it without the phone?

Doesn't work that well for Chinese and English. :)

> If I'm traveling somewhere where I can't read the menu, I probably don't know what any of the food is, either, so I'll eat anything. Trying new and unknown native customs is the whole point of traveling.

I mean yeah, but I want to know the general theme. I accidentally ordered Pine Nut ice cream in Mexico, it was delicious. (I expected pineapple, nope, something better!)

But even being willing to try interesting foods, I want to at least know I'll get something I can eat. I don't care if it is served with a side of stinky tofu and it is spicy enough to burn down a small forest, but there are certain foods I've tried (repeatedly!) and found out I don't like. I'll revisit them every few years and try again, but I don't want to order entrails 3x in a row by mistake.

But hey, turns out squid jerky is pretty good!

> Actually, my friends who don't use GPS got lost the first few times, but now know the city better than anyone.

Of course, but if I have to meet someone somewhere, I'll use GPS because "sorry I got lost exploring" is a crappy reason to delay someone else.

I'm more than willing to wander around places w/o GPS. But sometimes I actually need to get someplace.

Or heck, just get out of a Tokyo subway station. :) (Though some of the stations are a LOT of fun to get lost in!)

> In a lot of countries, a smart phone is necessary. It is how things are paid for, how metro schedules are shown, how tickets are scanned, it is how local taxis[1] are hailed.

It's convenient, but never necessary. I've backpacked through 40~ countries, often without a local SIM card, and was fine.

I have a backup phone...

I carry two backup phones, $2000 in USD, $2000 or so in local currency, and a couple krugerrands at all times whilst traveling. I also have two iPads, and those and the three phones are all preloaded with offline maps (Guru Maps) of the country I am in as well as all neighboring countries.

Be prepared.

That seems a bit... excessive? I'd assume you'd just need two debit cards for two different banks that offer ATM fee reimbursements, like Charles Schwab and Fidelity. Keep one in your money belt and the other in your pack that you normally keep in your hotel room. Barring some crazy sudden regional disaster, I'd expect you'd always be able to pull whatever cash you need from an ATM on any given day. Although the VISA system did go down (https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...) while I was on vacation in London last year, so there's always the possibility of that, I suppose.

It really wasn't that long ago that smartphones and tablets didn't exist, and hundreds of millions of people still managed to travel by using printed maps and asking local people for directions. I think that still works?

Power outages. Natural disasters. Civil unrest. Account freezes. Erroneous government investigations. Travel fraud alerts. Big crowds that result in empty ATMs. Cell network overloads. Strong magnetic fields.

There are a million common ways that access to cash can be impeded. Carrying a small extra wallet is no inconvenience whatsoever. I’m not sure why it would count as excessive. I think it is insane and massively short sighted to rely solely on cards. I bet I could find thousands in Puerto Rico who agree.

Nevermind privacy - it’s possible I would like my real-time location and purchase history to not be reported to the USA intelligence community in real-time, occasionally. Cards do this as a matter of course.

I don’t have paper maps, and carrying offline digital copies of maps of the regions in which I intend to travel on all of my devices is quick, easy, and convenient.

Actually, I think people should travel with a burner phone that does not have any of their standard apps and logins.

Step 1: Buy a burner phone with basic capabilities (maps, etc) Step 2: Import critical contacts from your main phone Step 3: Share your burner number with a set of friends just in case Step 4: ??? Step 5: Profit (phone-free, enjoy your vacation without distractions and without being worried)

I live in a mountainous area. Fifteen minutes from my house, there is no cell coverage. There are lots of hikers and climbers around. Why aren't there dead bodies everywhere?

I think it’s pretty clear that Bigfoot is pretty fastidious and maintains a clean wilderness.

I have my iPhone in my backpack for regular tasks and taking photos. Next to that I have one of those rugged Android phones from China on my handlebars for navigation.

The iPhone has my regular SIM-card, the Android phone has a local SIM-card and acts as a WiFi hotspot for the iPhone. Both phones have offline map data in various apps (TomTom, OsmAnd, Google Maps).

This way I will always have a device to call 911/112, find a hotel or a gas station.

This comment really put me in mind of Gentle Seduction

https://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

I don't know why I can't flag this but this is spam. Obviously don't click the link.

I'm not sure what makes you think that? It's a short story that circulates on this site from time to time, about the very process you describe, how a technology goes from unimagined to perceived as necessary

Probably overreacted to the expired cert message, and having not actually read the warning, assumed the worst.

Ok, my apologies, now I can't edit it.

The combination on word seduction which is a frequent topic of spam links and the invalid cert made me think this was some type of spam. I'll go back and read the article.

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