Musings on (dis)connectivity

Last night I arrived at friendly Dragon Town Hostel in Chengdu, almost an hour earlier than I'd expected, and in the grips of the first substantial bout of homesickness I've felt so far. Sure, I've missed y'all and the comforts of home, but this was different. For a little while last night, I just wanted to close my eyes, open them and find myself in familiar surroundings, with friends and family, speaking in complete English sentences.

It is not lost on me that this moment arrived at the half-way mark of this trip, or that it intensified after dropping my pack in my room and walking across the street to a noisy bar filled with raucous, inebriated groups of Chinese friends sharing food, drink and laughter. I had the brilliant notion that this would be a good time to pull out my guidebook and bone up on Chinese history. Well, for future reference, tales of feudal and imperial China are not comfort-reading. (The violence of American history is arguably worse, and more concentrated, but is not as expansive. In China, there's been ample time for lots and lots of bad stuff to happen. Thousands of years worth of tear- and blood-stained conflict, continuing through today, as the recent reports of child slavery and indentured servitude suggest.)

After a passable night's sleep*, I feel better and ready to encounter Chengdu. I'm going to take it easy today, and may begin with a massage at a place down the block I learned about from Annamarie, a Dutch traveler I met in Chongqing. She reported that the cost of a 90-minute treatment followed by a foot rub runs something like $6.00. Sounds heavenly. (With each step, my legs are still aware of the stair climb, so I may have them focus most of those 90 minutes on my calves.)

Tomorrow, I get to see pandas! The world's research and breeding center for pandas is just a few miles from here, and among the sights are lots of baby pandas, including twins born recently.

Thanks to the three of you who've broken the news about the precipitous drop in the cost of the iPhone, and the dangers of racking up insane bills while I'm over here. It has been an amazing tool for staying in touch, and although I have been deliberate about how often I'm connecting up to the network and incurring charges, I've done so far more than I'd anticipated. It's going to be a scary cell phone bill for September.

Apple and AT&T (the only service carrier for the iPhone) really don't have their act together for international travelers: if you allow the iPhone to connect to any network at all (even a free Wifi), there's no way to prevent it from attempting to connect with the AT&T network. In other words, there's no way, if you use it wirelessly at all, to prevent it from incurring some costs. More importantly, while back home the data plan is unlimited, over here there's an outrageous charge for every kilobyte transferred. (AT&T must be embarrassed by the comparatively faster data network over here, and is trying to prevent folks from discovering how much better it could be back home.) And unlike fellow-traveler Annamarie, who could just drop a new SIM card into her phone to have it behave like a super-affordable, super-convenient Chinese cell phone, all the forum and blog postings I read about this before I left suggested you could attempt the same with the iPhone only at your own risk, with unknown consequences for your iPhone's information, and dubious access to reliable data service. (I have not taken the risk.)

Knowing what I know now, I'd strongly recommend that travelers on a trip like this bring along a cell phone with a SIM card you can safely replace, and make getting a new Chinese SIM card with a pre-paid number of minutes one of your first orders of business. Having an operable cell phone would be infinitely easier, cheaper and more useful than my failed attempts to buy various "smartcards" to use in payphones (which are subject to the limited availability of such phones in the first place, and to the byzantine rules attached to the cards and printed only in Chinese, including the inability with most of them to use the cards anywhere except the city in which you purchase them). With two weeks left, I am still tempted to buy a Chinese cell phone, in part because what could be more fun than having my own number in China?

Before you answer that question, one exciting development has been the emergence of web portals for Skype (and probably other internet-based international phone services) which let you use you a website (e.g., Skype for iPhone) to initiate a call between two phone numbers anywhere in the world, costing just pennies a minute compared to the absurd $2.29 / min AT&T would charge me for phone service here. For this to be practical, a local phone number is both essential and muy convenient.

Still, this hardly feels elegant. I can imagine the day when my nephew will be able to stay in touch affordably while traveling the world, without having to learn such arcane (and quickly obsolete) technical knowledge. Let's hope the rest of us live to see that day, too.

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*Can we all agree that if any of us are bunked in an eight-person dormitory, thou shalt not set a cell phone alarm to ring before the sixth hour of thy day, or if thou must, thou shalt not have an annoying alarm sound, or if thou cannot change thy alarm tone, thou shalt not press snooze, or if thou does, thou shalt not do so more than once, and thou shalt absolutely not press snooze five times?