A family friend, just back from an Everest Base Camp expedition had one tip - get yourself some merino wool pants. No more worrying about how many to take, washing the ones you’ve got and lugging them around the world. One pair should do you for days or even weeks! I jumped at the idea but my girlfriend is not so sure. 11 days to persuade her!
Yay finally got a rucksack, it’s been weeks if not months of searching and I’ve finally found the sack of my dreams! It had to be big and have loads of strappy and pockety bits and “functions”. This one’s got ‘em all; 85 litres, front opening for those hard to reach areas, sleeping bag bit, water carrying bit, pouches, netting, toggles and pulleys and even better: two things I can’t even identify. Great. Now I just need all those other things I’ve not got!
Sorry – got carried away and had to add a picture!
| Manufacturer | Model | Write | Read | Label |
| SanDisk | Standard (no speed rating) | 4.5MB\Sec (30x) | 4.5MB\Sec (30x) | None |
| Ultra II | 9MB\Sec (60x) | 10MB\Sec (66x) | 66x | |
| Extreme Ducati | 20MB\Sec (133x) | 20MB\Sec (133x) | 133x | |
| Extreme III | 20MB\Sec (133x) | 20MB\Sec (133x) | 133x | |
| Kingston | Secure Digital | |||
| Secure Digital Elite Pro | 7.7MB\Sec (51x) | 8.2MB\Sec (55x) | 50x | |
| Secure Digital Ultimate | 20MB\Sec (133x) | 21MB\Sec (140) | 133x | |
| Secure Digital Class 2 | 2MB\Sec (13x) | 2MB\Sec (13x) | Class 2 | |
| Secure Digital Class 4 | 4MB\Sec (26x) | 4MB\Sec (26x) | Class 4 | |
| Secure Digital Class 6 | 6MB\Sec (40x) | 6MB\Sec (40x) | Class 6 | |
| Crucial | Secure Digital | 3MB\Sec (20x) | 3MB\Sec (20x) | None |
| Lexar | Platinum II | 8.5Mb\Sec (57x) | 8.5Mb\Sec (57x) | None |
I completely believe all the manufacturers got together (except SanDisk I have to say) one day in a room and came up with the most opaque, random and damn right hard to fathom system of classifying the speed of their cards. Possibly it took them a week.
Basically I think all you need to know about a memory card is how big it is, that’s easy peasy and then how fast it is. To find out how fast it is you need a standard of course and you also need to be measuring the same thing each time. There is a standard out there (1.5MB\Sec = 1x) but not everyone uses that, and then there are two really important things to measure that matter the user, read and write speed. But then there are other measures too, erase speed and of course you can average these (or choose to just average two of them etc etc!) Basically trying to compare memory cards from the info you are given is almost impossible. Some manufactures don’t even display any speed info about their products or hide it way away in techno babble in some distant document.
Does speed matter that much? Possibly not if you’re just snapping away with a compact camera so I’d stop reading right here – (a bit late sorry!) there are better things to be doing right now. It would definitely matter on professional digital SLRs but could also definitely matter on your more standard DSLR like I have or the new compacts capable of recording HD TV video. What I was more interested in though was just getting the best card for the money, going off a big trip like this one, it’s going to be a real arse if I get somewhere and I’ve either run out of cards because I bought too few because they were too expensive or bought the cheapest biggest cards and missed that amaaazing shot because the camera couldn’t write the last picture fast enough. Second thoughts, I don’t think I’m going to take a camera now. You can spend too much time looking through a lens.
Sources and more info:
http://www.valuemedia.co.uk/sd_card_speed_tests.htm
http://www.sandisk.com
http://www.kingston.com/flash/photo.asp
http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2006/07/22/Memory-Card-Roundup/p5
http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2006/07/22/Memory-Card-Roundup/p7
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f122/sd-cards-speed-ratings-card-readers-writers-199888/
And the main thing is planning the leaving party! I’m quite excited about it really, my passport might still be at the Vietnamese Embassy, I might not have a rucksack, sold my car or have enough Malaria tablets yet but hey, at least we’ve got nibbles.
Sorry I’ve been very very lax recently on the internet side but promise to put loads and loads of interesting things up soon! This travel planning really does take up your life. 14 days to go and 29.5 hours to party…
At the risk of showing off… Oh my word, this is where I’ll be for Christmas this year! Suddenly sooooo excited!
Aitutaki
Plan C: OK, I’ve got this fancy American express card that’s supposed to be able to get me out of anything, let’s give it a go. OK they found the flight, and the flight on the right date and time, great, but doh! They can’t book it. Now I’m v concerned. They go off for a while and come back. I could call the Amex office in Mexico City and they might be able to do it for me, could transfer some funds or something or go down the road and buy me the tickets for cash? I shy away from calling them up and trying to explain that all over again. Kinda too frustrated for that kind of thing right now.
Throughout this I hadn’t really considered calling STA again first because Cuba was a such a no-no on the around the world tickets and second it just didn’t seem possible if you weren’t in Mexico physically. I even did a quick tour of local travel agents and basically got told (with a smirk sometimes) that as I hadn’t booked the whole trip with them they wouldn’t help (even after what I thought was some very reasoned debate on my part sometimes). That really was the last straw. Wait till the recession hits them! Then they’ll want my money!
Hmmm sooo maybe as these agents weren’t saying they couldn’t do it, the one that booked our trip could? Bizarrely only now did I pick up the phone to Julia at STA in Brighton and pop the question. She’d call me back. I called her back, she was with a customer as usual! She called back late in the day with good (ish) news. They could get the flights! Not quite the same flights but near enough, we’d have to rearrange our itinerary and spend much more time than we wanted in airports but hey! We were going on Holiday! I jumped at the tickets and all was set. Feeling rather happy I went off home with the good news. See… I could could sort travel plans out!
About 7pm the mobile went, it was Julia again, she’d found the exact flights I wanted originally, same prince, all sorted! I wasn’t expecting that!
PS. Still no being paid by STA, although it might look like it :-)
Right I’ve had enough, I’ve exhausted all possibilities, squinted at about a billion websites and had enough of confirming what I always reckoned. I want an EeePC! The ultimate travelling tool.
It’s a funny old process, trying to convince yourself of something you already made your mind up on ages ago but one I find myself doing a lot. Well now I have a mortgage anyway! There are probably tons of articles, reams of research and hundreds of psychology students out there studying this right now. A strange form of shopaholicism where you do absolutely everything not to buy something then buy it anyway. Well I’m off to do that right now with no guilt and a clear conscience that it’s the right tool for the job. I need one 
Now all the plans are in place, the fights are all booked, bribes exchanged and visas on their way I reckon I’ve earned some time to get myself travel gadgeted up. A lot’s changed even in those 10 years from that heady, some would say foolhardy attempted Africa trip. We all know you can’t move for internet cafes in any discerning backpacker\tourist hot spot but get out of those places and your daily fix of facebook can be hard to come by. Here at home, mobile internet is everywhere and anyone can get a web phone and access for next to nothing. Outside your home country, it’s a very different matter with roaming data packages hugely expensive for long trips and typing on a keyboard ment to send “u r gr8 txt me l8r” and “lol” is just silly. iPhone\iPod Touch is a great invention but that wiley Mr Apple really doesn’t want his ipod\phone sales hitting his laptop sales so isn’t going anywhere near offering usb or keyboard connectivity – although we all know it’s so temptingly possible. I’ve searched high and low and even read some blogs about that debate! In the next few days I’m going to try to put together what I’ve found from some pretty extensive research on loads of things from connectivity and power to cameras and computery things. For those of us wanting to send that video you took of meeting Britney on the top of Mount Everest back to base camp before that paparazzi’s huskies get him back to the local Starbucks or for those of us just wanting to use those long bus journeys getting your latest blog or photos ready for upload. I’ll see what I can do!
39 Days to go
Before I said yes to this strange and new assignment I thought what on earth could be said that hadn’t been said before and why on earth would anyone want to read someone else’s travel ramblings. Reading about how amazing a time some tanned stranger was having getting in touch with themselves in a zorb or how the local yaks were so accommodating and spiritual up some misty mountain somewhere didn’t seem like much fun to me. Could I write anything that anyone would find vaguely interesting? Would anyone sign up after I exhausted my yahoo address book? How embarrassing if no one I knew wanted to know. To get around all these uncomfortables I thought I’d write a private blog just for me. I guess that’s what they used to call a diary back then. I’ve never had one of those either.
Then STA Exporers came along, alright I admit it, the offer of an audience was all it took! So here is my second first post (actually this is probably about the 6th go, lets just say the other unpublished versions were a bit “out there”, “ravings of a lunatic” spring to mind. OK I’m just getting the hang of this alright! Glad I didn’t press that publish button. Hope I didn’t anyway!)
So what am I gonna ramble about? Well the first thing I thought of when STA Contacted me was probably, “Brilliant I need a massive load of toys to do this, what toys are they gonna give me?” The second thing was probably ”Wow I know, I can write about toys”. Unfortunately the answer to the question about what toys are they gonna give me was “nothing”, not a sausage. So with 39 days to go before we’re off on the travels and not even a sausage to help me, I will be writing about essential (\not really essential at all) techno toys for travelling including shiny flashy things that go beep, websites and other mumbo jumbo. Then hopefully I will have learnt how to type, use the spell checker and not use so many exclamation marks and will start writing about more interesting things using my new toys! Brilliant!
