Off the Beaten Path — But Still on the Grid

Want to vacation in the world’s most exotic locations, yet stay connected? Here’s how.

Thanks to today’s communications technology, you can now vacation almost anywhere on Earth while still remaining in touch with the office.

My job as a travel writer has taken me to 60 countries on seven continents, and I need to stay connected. So I’ve emailed from an Antarctic cruise ship via satellite uplink ... cadged Wi-Fi from a cybercafé on Easter Island ... sought a better signal atop Etruscan tombs in Italy ... Skyped from a hotel computer in the Panamanian jungle.

How about you? Do the rain forests of Borneo beckon? At 130 million years old, they’re home to some 15,000 species of flowering plants and more than 600 different animals. Travel writer and ecologist Loren Bell visited recently. Though located eight hours by boat from the nearest Indonesian village, he emailed me while sitting beneath a tarp. “All you need is a semi-intelligent phone, a Bluetooth connection and a data plan,” he writes. “I haven’t hunted for Wi-Fi in years.”

Or how about Bhutan? This mountainous and mysterious Buddhist kingdom was closed off to outsiders until the 1970s, got its first TV set only in 1999, and is still famous for emphasizing Gross National Happiness over GNP. Yet an estimated 40 percent of the country now has Internet access.

Travel writer Lee Abbamonte recently fired up his laptop in the Paro, Bhutan, airport. Though he wanted only to type some notes for his blog, Abbamonte was surprised when a hotspot popped up. “I was shocked that they had Wi-Fi in the Himalayan Kingdom at all,” he says, “and especially that it was free and fast.”

How about vacationing in a cave? For thousands of years, people have gouged living spaces out of the volcanic rock of Cappadocia in central Turkey. Tom Brosnahan, a guidebook author, recently visited, staying at the Esbelli Evi House, a cave dwelling that has been turned into a boutique hotel. “It provides DSL-speed Wi-Fi, not to mention 500 channels of stereo music and satellite TV, in every cave room,” he reports.

Or consider Yap in Micronesia, where the residents, immune to many modern ways, still use currency made of stone (but substitute U.S. dollars for everyday transactions). Yet despite lying hundreds of miles from its nearest South Pacific neighbors, Yap is surprisingly well connected. Travel writer Edward Readicker-Henderson recently visited Yap, and he had no trouble getting online, thanks to Wi-Fi service in the Manta Ray Bay Resort. “I used Skype to call the States while looking out over the reef as a storm came in,” he says. “Women use their mobile phones in the grocery store — which wouldn’t be unusual, except that they’re wearing grass skirts.”

Reid Bramblett (ReidsGuides.com) has written more than 30 travel guidebooks.