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.
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.
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!)
It's convenient, but never necessary. I've backpacked through 40~ countries, often without a local SIM card, and was fine.
I would never have made it to many of the places where I was at without a phone or at least some other GPS
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)
Be prepared.
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?
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.
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.
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.