Smart travels with a Smartphone

There are tons of uses for a Smartphone on your travels.  Some of the things I’ve been using on my T-Mobile G2:

• Voice for making reservations, etc.
• GPS for navigation and locating where we’ve parked the car.
• email.
• Web browsing for finding travel and general information.
• Tethering my Smartphone to our Netbook to use as a high speed wireless modem when WiFi isn’t available.
• TripAdvisor for checking hotel and restaurant recommendations.
• American Airlines app. for checking flight status
• Alarm clock.
• Amazon Kindle reader to read several books.
• Music player to have something to listen to in the car. Especially good if you bring a mini plug pass through cable and connect into the car’s Aux port, so you can listen through the car’s sound system.
• Google Translate to translate words I don’t know.
• Games for when I get bored on the plane.
• Note taking (with photo capability)
• Backup camera if I don’t have my “real” camera with me.
• Mobile Blogging (Bloggeroid).
• Currency conversion (Oanda).
• Flashlight – surprisingly useful!

The problem is that is is exorbitantly expensive to use Smartphone features when you travel, unless you make some preparations.  If you want to travel with your phone and just use it  just for voice, you should make sure to disable data roaming to avoid a nasty surprise after your trip.

T-Mobile currently charges $15/MB for international roaming. AT&T is more expensive at  2 cents/KB = $20/MB.  So for instance, to  download one episode of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” podcast at 20MB,  which we’ve been listening to each week would be $300 on T-Mobile or $400 or AT&T!

AT&T does offer some international data plans, but they are expensive, e.g. $200 for 200MB per month. This might make sense if you are a continual traveller, but for most people going on vacation this is not an attractive rate and I don’t know if you can just sign up for one month.

The solution, if you want to be able to reasonably use your Smartphone while travelling, is to get a pre-paid SIM card in the country you are visiting.  This requires some prep. on your part before the trip:

1. You need to have a GSM based phone, which most Smartphones are.  It needs to work on the frequency in the country you’ll be visiting , but this should not be a problem as most modern GSM phones are multi-frequency and work anywhere in the world.
2. The phone needs to be unlocked.  This is where it gets complicated.  I’ve been a longtime T-Mobile customer and one thing they are great about is that when I get a new phone, they will give me the unlock code very quickly without any hassle.  Even when we first started with T-Mobile, I think they did they would do this within 3 months of us starting our contract.  Other carriers may not be so generous – they may charge you an unlock fee, make you wait for several months, or straight out refuse to unlock the phone.  My understanding is that this is the case with iPhones.   This means the only way to get your phone unlocked is to go to an unauthorized source and pay for the service.  Easily done in most Asian countries and you can even do it over the web.  But if something goes wrong, you could end up with a very expensive brick on your hands. 
3. Once you have an unlocked phone, you need to buy a pre-paid SIM card in the country you are travelling to.  This is easily done once you arrive in the country.  For instance, here in Spain, we went to the Phone House and got a Yoigo network pre-paid card for EU20 that includes EU20 credit for voice and 500MB of data, which is plenty for our needs.  Figure that is equivalent to just 1MB of data on AT&T roaming.  Keep in mind the following:
   - You will now have a new local phone number.  Calls to your regular phone number will not reach you (unless you setup call forwarding to your new phone number).  Once you put your regular SIM card back in the phone, you will be exactly back where you started, and will receive your regular phone calls.
   - Make sure you note your new phone number!  Online hotel reservations will want it and you will want to give this new phone number to anyone you want to be able to reach you directly.
   - It is a good idea to find out how to get your voicemail from a phone line other than your cell phone.  This way you can check your regular voicemail if you want to using your new local phone number or any other phone (including Skype).
   - Pre-paid SIM cards are generally inexpensive only in the country in which they are issued. so if you are visiting more than one country, you may want to get local SIMs in each.  In our case, when we went to Portugal, our Spanish card’s rates went up, but were still better than using our American SIM.  Since we were there for only a few days, we didn’t bother getting a Portuguese card, but we did turn off data roaming in Portugal.
   - Adding credit to a pre-paid SIM is easy.  In fact you can do this at most supermarkets and many shops as well as phone stores.
   - To keep your SIM card and any remaining credit “alive” you need to use the SIM card every so often.  I had a UK T-Mobile SIM card and it needed to have some use (voice call, text, etc.) once every six months.  The Yoigo card needs to be used every three months.  Otherwise, you loose any remaining credit and the SIM becomes useless.  Not really a problem unless you’ve loaded lots of credit onto the card and/or you’ll be going back to the same country say in a year.  If so, you’ll need to swap out your regular SIM for your foreign SIM within the time allowed, e.g. if I wanted to keep my Yoigo card alive, I would need to make sure to send a text or make a brief several times a year each time before the 3 month limit is up.

So, bring the phone, bring the charger (make sure you have a local adapter and a car charger too!) and make the most of your trip.

Granada–The Alhambra and Generalife

Fun fact: Granada is the Spanish for Pomegranate and for grenade (the kind of explosive you throw).  There are numerous Pomegranate trees around here, presumably brought with the Moors from Persia, where it is native.

The main attraction in Granada (and one of, if not the most popular in Spain), is the Alhmabra/Generalife complex. Online information is a bit confusing, so here are some pointers if you want to visit:

The Alhambra is one complex, and the Generalife is another, which is adjacent and included in the same ticket.

Within the Alhambra, there are three main areas – the Alcazaba, which was the principal military area, the Nasrid Palaces, which are the jewels in the crown, and the Partal, which is mostly ruins and gardens of another palace.  There are also some surrounding buildings, parks, and other areas.

It is essential to book tickets ahead, which is easily done by phone or on the internet.  Tickets can be picked up at self service kiosks in the entrance using the credit card you used to pay for them.  You get a specific reserved time for visiting the Nasrid Palaces and you are recommended to arrive about an hour earlier in order to make your way to the palace for your reserved time, since it is about a 20 minute walk from the entrance and the site can get busy.  As we had fairly early morning reservation times, there weren’t too many people about when we arrrived, so got to see the Alcazaba before our ticket time for the Nasrid Palaces.

There are different kinds of tickets for sale, but the general daytime admission ticket takes you to the whole complex, and this is the one you’ll probably want.

You can only visit the Alcazaba, Nasrid Palaces, and Generalife Palaces once, so it’s a good idea to go slow, take your time, and enjoy the space.  Of these, the Nasrid Palaces is the only space that has a timed ticket. This is done to keep the number of simultaneous visitors down and protect the property.

We spent about 5 1/2 hours in total going through all the parts of the site that we could visit.  It was a relatively cool day with cloud cover, so it was pleasant to be there the whole time.  In fact, afterwards we ended up walking about 6KM back to our hotel.  However usually at this time of year it gets very hot in the afternoons, so it’s a good idea to go on the earlier side to beat the heat, which also has the advantage that less people seem to be about.

Also, tickets are issued either for morning (8:30 to 14:00) or afternoon (14:00 until closing).  If you have afternoon tickets, you can’t enter any earlier than 2pm.  If you have morning tickets, you are supposed to be out of the complex by 2pm, but there is no real way for them to find you and kick you out, so from what we read, as long as you enter the final area you want to visit before 2pm, you can stay in that general area as long as you like.

It is also possible to buy a garden ticket, which does not include access to the Nasrid Palaces, but it would be a huge loss to come all this way and not see them.  Separate evening tickets are also available to the Nasrid Palaces or Generalife.

So what is the Alhambra and Generalife? Although Granada was first occupied by Moors in the 8th Century, the golden era came during the rule of the Nasrid Dynasty from 1238 until 1492.  Successive rulers build fortifications, palaces, and gardens in an aim to create paradise on earth and the result is the Alhambra and Generalife we see today. 

Actually, what we see today is the Nasrid buildings, as well as later modifications done principally by Charles V.  Up until relatively recent times the place was a ruin.  Thankfully the Napleonic troops did not succeed in blowing up the place, but when the American writer Washington Irving (of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow fame) lived here in the 1820s he described much of the place as a romantic ruin and talked of swimming in the pools with gypsies and local Spaniards. Irving wrote “Tales of the Alhambra” after his visit and is held in high regard here – there are several monuments to him on the grounds.

It is hard to do the Alhambra justice in photos – the place is really spectacular, with incredible detail in the tilework, plasterwork and woodwork that feature Islamic geometric patterns and calligraphy. Perhaps it is no wonder that after visiting here in 1922, M. C. Escher was inspired to work with the tessellations for which he is famous.

Water is a key element in the design of the buildings and grounds.  In many places there are fountains and pools, often running inside the buildings. There is even a water staircase in the Generalife where water cascades down the handrails.

At one of the main pools we found a cat eyeing the fish in the pond and hoping for one to make it close enough to the rim to make a meal.

The inside of the Nasrid Palaces are the most richly decorated and one can see traces of color that must have made the finished rooms even more spectacular.  Small niches are to be found at the entrance to many of the rooms.  Once thought to be places to store slippers, it is now believed that they held flowers instead.

Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor visited here in 1526 and liked the place so much that he build perhaps the most important Spanish Renaissance palace on the grounds.  The Italianate structure seems strangely out of place amongst all the Moorish buildings.

There are some great views of the surrounding old quarter of Granada, the Albaicin, as you walk around the walls.

If you ever plan a trip to Spain, I highly recommend including Granada on your itinerary.

As you can see, I took a lot of pictures today!

But I would have been happy to take many more.

Another day, another country.

Well, officially it’s an overseas dependent territory of the UK, but today we spent most of the day visiting Gibraltar aka Gib, or just “The Rock”.  Britain gained the territory at the Treat of Utrecht in 1713 following the war of Spanish succession.  Although it has been attacked many times since, it retains its invincible defensive position at the Southern end of Europe.  These days however, its military significance has somewhat waned, and the UK government has drawn down most of the military forces that used to be stationed there.

We had read that driving over the border from Spain can be a very long proposition.  We were also told that parking can be very difficult to find.  Someone we met on the boat to Morocco yesterday told us he spent about 2 hours waiting to drive across, so we had planned to park in La Linea on the Spanish side.  We first parked on a side street and fed the parking ticket machine and although it took our money, it did not deliver the necessary ticket.   We thought about leaving a note, but in the end decided it would be better to play it safe and find another parking spot and a machine that worked. 

Since there seemed to be lots of street parking, I figured we’d drive up as close to the border as we could before parking and waling across, but before we knew it, we ended up in the line to go across the border and within a couple of minutes were in Gibraltar – evidently no long lines today!

Once you enter Gibraltar, you have to drive across the airport’s runway.  They stop traffic when planes come in, but it is certainly unusual to find yourself in the middle of a landing strip.   Next issue was parking, and we lucked out again finding free street parking close to the city center.

We had some coffee on the docks, then walked into the center of town, looking around some historic buildings.  My sister in law Ruth is from Gibraltar (Andy’s wife) and she had recommended taking a taxi tour of the rock.  The taxi is actually an 8 passenger van and for a reasonable fee it takes you to the most popular sites, including the entrance fees.

As we drove off, the driver pointed out the original sea walls, which are now well inland.  A significant area of Gibraltar is land that has been reclaimed from the sea, a process that continues today.

Our first stop was the “Pillars of Hercules” monument.  Supposedly in ancient times, Gibraltar was seen as Hercules's Pillars, and it is not hard to imagine why.

Gibraltar gets is name as a corruption of Jebel Tariq, or Tariq’s mountain, named after the Moorish king who came this way to start the Moorish conquest of Andalusia.

The Rock is also the only European location with native apes.  Barbary Apes or Macaques to be precise and there are about 300 of them in 5 different clans.  They seen to be completely unafraid of people.  At one of our stops, the van door was left open.  Kelly had got back inside when one of the apes jumped in, went up to the front of the cab and stole the driver’s apple!

The Rock has much more roadway inside it in the form of tunnels, than outside.  Although it looks like one solid rock on the outside, it is in fact studded with caves and tunnels. St. Michael’s caves were prepared as a hospital in WWII, but did not need to be used.  Today it is a classical concert venue due to its excellent acoustics.

We also got to see some of the first man made tunnels on the rock, which were due to allow cannons to be moved into place to defend an otherwise vulnerable area.  These canons are unique for their time in that they were adapted to allow downward firing.

We kept climbing until we reached the peak, where on one side you see the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other, the Mediterranean.  On a clear day, you can also see Morocco, but this was a hazy summer day, so we sort of peaked some North African mountains in the distance.

Our taxi dropped us back off in the center of town, where we had a nice lunch.  On our way back to the car we stopped at the Trafalgar Cemetery where there are British sailor’s graves from the sea battles fought of Spain’s coast 200 years ago.  After picking up the car, we kept going and drove completely around the rock, along the Mediterranean side, which involves going through several short tunnels before ending up back near the airport. 

Noticing that petrol was about 20% cheaper here than Spain (which in turn was about 15-20% cheaper than Portugal and Ireland), we filled up, then headed back across the border (took us 4 minutes!) and on our way towards Granada.

We chose to take a longer route though the mountains in order to visit the town of Ronda, one of the most spectacularly located towns in Spain, perched atop a precipitous limestone cleft spanned by an extremely tall bridge.

 

After some refreshments, we headed on to Granada, thankfully over fast, flat roads and got there pretty fast.  Unfortunately we had a hard time finding the hotel, so we ended up cruising back and forth for a while before we finally located it.  GPS is great, but only when you have the correct address!

Tangier– Rocking the Kasbah

Today turned out to be a little weird. 

When we started planning this whole trip, I hoped that we might have time to make a quick trip to Tangier, Morocco, which is supposed to be easily accessible from Southern Spain.   

In fact someone we ended up sitting next to for dinner a few nights ago was telling us how much fun Tangier’s Medina (old town), and Kasbah were.

As we found ourselves a little ahead of our planned schedule, we ended up with enough time to be able to do a day trip to Morocco.  We chose to stay in a Spanish port town called Algeciras which has fast ferries to North Africa, and is also very close to Gibraltar, our next side trip.

I do quite a bit of research for our travels, but I was getting terribly confused when checking the ferries to Tangier.  To cut a long story short, and only after finding a brief mention in a travel related forum, I figured out that over the last year, the new, modern port of Tangier MED was opened, which is about 40KM (25 miles) from the old port of Tangier, which is right next to the town.  All the Algecerias ferries go to Tangier MED, from which it is another hour by train, bus or taxi to get to the old city.  There are still fast ferries that go to Taniger town, but these leave from Tarifa, which is about a 25 minute drive west of Algeciras, so no real problem, once we figured this out.

Although people told us there were several ferry operators running the Tarifa-Tangier line, it turns out there are only two.  The FRS schedule online says the journey takes 35 minutes – it is even painted in huge letters and numbers on the sides of their boats.  Yet consulting the online schedule showed that boats leave on odd hours and arrive at exactly the same time in Tanger which is an hour behind Spain.  Sounds more like 60 minutes to me than 35! 

Also the online forums said that the boats often run late, and indeed our boat ended up leaving about 45 minutes past schedule.  Once we got just outside Tangier, they apologized, but we needed to wait for a while before docking, about another 20 minutes.  So, make that 35 minute journey more like 2 hours.

The boats themselves are large catamarans that take anything from motorcycles all the way up to large trucks and buses across the 9 mile straight.  Passengers walk off the car ramps before the vehicles are allowed off.

When we got into Morocco we tried to go to the arrivals area, but a border guard told us that our arrival cards had not been stamped, which was supposed to have been done on the ship.  There was no sign to this effect, not even next to the forms when we picked them up, so we had to go back on board to get an entry stamp, BUT the immigration official had already left the ship, so we had to wait for the official who was going to make the next crossing.  The boat personnel said “just 3 minutes”, but I figured this would be a Moroccan 3 minutes, not a German 3 minutes, and indeed about 30 minutes later we had our stamps and walked out of the port.  Thankfully many of the touts and “guides” had already left, but we still had a few offers to guide us around, which we were eventually able to refuse.

In the end, old Tangier came across to me as just another border town, kind of like an Islamic Tijuana.  That doesn’t mean that it was awful, but I certainly didn’t find it quite as interesting and exotic as others appear to have done.   Perhaps this is because we’ve travelled many places, including Islamic countries and aren’t intimidated by Muslims or Arabic writing.

The main things to see were the Medina (old town) and Kasbah (fortified noble person’s house, confusingly sometimes also used to describe a Medina).  The Medina reminded us of the old city of Jerusalem (albeit with less Hebrew and more Arabic and French!) with its steep, narrow, winding streets.  Perhaps one of the best parts of the day for me was just wandering into residential areas and seeing the amazing variety of bright colors used to decorate the exteriors of the houses.

The Kasbah houses an interesting museum that has artifacts from Roman times through the 19th century and was a pleasant, cool place to wander around in quiet.

We tried to have lunch, but the cafes were apparently not serving for at least another hour.  I think this had something to do with it being Friday.  In the end, we were able to get some lovely mint tea and some sandwiches of almond butter on nice bread.  Not quite as exotic as we were hoping!

Just before we went back to the port, we decided to hunt for the Jewish graveyard I remember seeing on a map, although it was not marked on any of the maps we had with us.   We located a graveyard, but it appeared only to be a Muslim graveyard and was the worst looking graveyard I have ever seen.  Apart from it being overgrown (right next to a mowed park), and strewn with trash, many of the graves were smashed and lots of fires had been lit nearby.  This seems quite odd odd to me.  For what it is worth, when we got back to Spain, I looked up the Jewish cemetery and it is apparently very neatly kept and well maintained.

My favorite part of the day was looking at the people with their wide variety of dress.  Lots of men wore kaftans with hoods, some in simple colors, others in interesting striped patterns.  I know part of Star Wars was filmed in North Africa and I am sure that they must have based some of the costumes such as the Jedi Knight’s cloaks after the locals’ dress.  We also saw a few women who were dressed wearing hats that looked a bit like Mexican sombreros.  These, I believe  were  Berber women, who were there for market day. Unfortunately it was pretty clear that people did not want to have their picture taken, so I refrained from making any portraits, but there were some wonderful subjects.

When it came time to leave Morocco, would you believe we had more paperwork problems?  The immigration official wanted to know where our departure cards were.  We told her we didn’t have any and hadn’t even seen these.   In the end she grumpily gave us two (which didn’t match with each other), stamped them and kept them.  At no point in the trip on the way over was there any information about these.

We decided to take the 4pm sailing back and arrived at the port a little early, but there was something wrong with the boat, so we ended up having to wait for another one to come from Spain.  In the end, the boat arrived after about 90 minutes, but by the time we left Tangier it was 7pm local time (3 hours late) and the return trip took another hour.  So in the end we probably spent as much time waiting for, and traveling on the boat as we did in Tangier!

I’ve heard from several other travelers I know that Morocco is a wonderful country, and I hope some day that we can come back and explore the more interesting parts, but Tangier won’t be high on my list to come back to.  If one has only traveled through European cities, I supposed I can see how this day trip might be exotic and exciting.  In the end, I am glad we made the journey, but won’t be in any hurry to do it again.