We spent five days in Cancun, Mexico and just got back. It was a lot of fun and relaxation. The beaches were fantastic! During the travels this summer I used a lot of technologies myself and noticed the use of various technologies around me. The first and foremost thing I notice is that no matter where one is, most people are carrying a mobile device. Whether it is the trains in Malaysia or relaxing on the beaches in Cancun, many have a cell phone they are checking or talking on or are looking at things on their tablets. Of course, it goes without saying that it included me and it made me not feel guilty 🙂
Secondly, wireless was everywhere. However, depending on where you are, the access can be an issue. In Kuala Lumpur, I was able to get WiFi access perfectly in the hotel, guest WiFi at University of Malaya was a bit of an issue, wireless at Starbucks was perfect. In Cancun, one of the hotels we stayed in had no WiFi in the room (we vacated the place the next day and moved to another hotel!), but the other was perfect and the WiFi was available even in the beaches adjoining the hotel (several feet away). However, Starbucks required you to purchase something and you had to use the password printed on the receipt (waste of paper) and you had only 15 minutes of access.
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Pygmy Elephants in the banks of Kinabatangan River in Sabah, Malaysia
As many of you know, my wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia. One of the things I knew going in was that we were going to spend a week in Malaysian Borneo and that the internet connection would be essentially non-existent. I was very concerned about my own well being under those conditions.
I am happy to tell you that we survived being unplugged. The reason was that the unplugging was only for the first three days and even during that time, I could go to a cafe in the rainforest and after many retries, at least get to read my email.
I know that many of you feel I am crazy to be checking email on my vacation. Guess what, we are absolutely fine with it and we still enjoy our vacations tremendously. The added advantage is that I don’t have a mound of email to deal with when I get back. Anyways, these are personal preferences that we don’t have to go into.
Our first stop in Borneo was Gunung Mulu national park. It is a rainforest with some of the most impressive and massive caves. We spent three days there. We walked a lot in humid and hot conditions, took a night walk and saw some insects. However, our imagination of what a rainforest would be turned out to be very different from what it really is. For one, there was no rain for three days and though you could hear a lot of bird sounds, we did not see many of them. The canopy walk was interesting and a very early morning walk up a watch tower with a newly bought pair of binoculars yielded pretty much nothing. Nope, you can’t blame it on my inexperience with the binoculars. A gentleman from Holland who accompanied us has a lot of experience and he reminded us that these are not “sure shots”.
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We spent five days in Cancun, Mexico and just got back. It was a lot of fun and relaxation. The beaches were fantastic! During the travels this summer I used a lot of technologies myself and noticed the use of various technologies around me. The first and foremost thing I notice is that no matter where one is, most people are carrying a mobile device. Whether it is the trains in Malaysia or relaxing on the beaches in Cancun, many have a cell phone they are checking or talking on or are looking at things on their tablets. Of course, it goes without saying that it included me and it made me not feel guilty 🙂