by Ben Groundwater
It's the mobile phones that bug me the most.
Not that there's anything wrong with taking them away with you, but some people get obsessed with them.
You'll see them texting their "besties" from the top of the Eiffel Tower, calling home so their Mum can listen to the busker they just came across, snapping off photos to MMS to their mates, madly texting away in the common room at the hostel.
If you miss your friends that much, why go away in the first place?
Technology has made massive changes to the way we travel in the last 10 years - some of them are great, some of them don't affect us much at all, and some of them bug the hell out of me.
The first few times I travelled independently, I didn't have a phone. Hell, I didn't even have an email address, which is close to unthinkable now. I actually posted letters.
My parents like to tell the story of how they met up with some friends while backpacking around Europe in the '70s. With no means of communication while they were both on the road, they planned to meet up at a certain Munich campsite on a certain date four months in the future. If anything happened to them, or either couple changed their plans, they just wouldn't be there.
That their cars pulled into the campsite at exactly the same time, one behind the other, on that day is almost irrelevant. It's the sheer unpredictability of the rendezvous that most of us will now never experience, thanks to things like mobile phones and email. And I think we're the poorer for it.
The term "lonely planet" is now pretty irrelevant. Just how lonely can you be when, almost anywhere in the world, you can whip out your phone and dial, or flip open your laptop and access the nearest WiFi signal, and be chatting away to your nearest and dearest in seconds?
Not that it's always a bad thing. Working on tours in Europe, my mobile was a lifesaver on several occasions. Whatever I was doing, or wherever I was, if it all went pear-shaped I could just text my driver, let him know what was going on, and organise a new meeting point. Back when my parents were travelling, the driver and I would have spent hours trying to find each other, fighting our way through a foreign city with 30 confused tourists in tow.
But that's the problem. Think about all your best stories: most of them revolve around when something went wrong. Your car broke down, so you had to hitch a lift with a local, and ended up having dinner with their family. You got lost, and wound up in a beautiful part of town you never would have discovered.
But those handy little gadgets can prevent that from ever happening.
I know a few people who travel with the little GPS satellite navigation systems. They're priceless when you hire a car and really just want to get to where you're going, but they also take all the adventure out of it. They take out the crazy shortcuts that someone told you about, the wars with Italian Carabinieri over which streets you can go down, the bungled city tours that wind up in another city altogether.
Those are the things you laugh about years later.
So what do you do? Do you go old fashioned and leave all your gadgets at home?
I think you need to strike a balance. Sure, take your phone, but don't leave it switched on all the time, texting your mates constantly (even I've been guilty of this). Have it with you for emergencies, and just switch it on to check your messages, say, once every few days.
Take a laptop if you'll actually use it, but not if you're going to spend your whole trip worrying about having it stolen. (My mate Matt had one on our South America trip, and would peer around at every hostel we arrived at: "But where am I going to leave the laptop?" He ended up carrying it around with him most days.)
A good rule of thumb is: never travel with something you're going to regret losing.
Take an MP3 player, too. For long bus trips, or train trips, or flights, or any time of pure boredom, they're the greatest things ever invented. But don't use them while you're walking down a city street, or sitting in a restaurant by yourself, or - and I swear to God I saw this a few months ago - trekking along the Inca Trail. You'll miss more than you realise.
Get an email address or a Facebook profile - but don't become obsessed with it. You can bore everyone with your stories when you get home (er, trust me).
And get the niftiest, coolest little digital camera you can get your hands on, and get snap happy. You can always delete them when you get home, and you'll never regret taking one.
But whatever you do, don't let your gadgets - and the friends and relatives on the other end of them - run your holiday.
And change your bloody ringtone.
Ben is on loan to us from his real job at the Sydney Morning Herald. If you would like to contact him you can at bgroundwater@fairfax.com.au and you can check out his regular column at http://blogs.smh.com.au/travel/archives/the_backpackers/
