Does using your phone ruin travelling?
This is something that I've been considering lately- spent a few weeks abroad in Southeast Asia and Europe, and I realized that using my phone killed so much of the allure of travelling during the first leg of the trip.
Of course it's nice, easily accessing an Uber, downloading a map, looking up the best places to eat, etc... but I feel like it really sucks the soul out of the whole thing. Especially when the people you're with keep taking Snaps and posting to their story, taking unlimited pictures.
I went solo for a bit and just left my phone in the hotel, which was tough as well, but getting to ask people for directions, discovering stuff randomly, not worrying about other people seeing where I am, etc... makes it so much better in my opinion. I think in the future for trips I'll just bring a 'dumb' phone just so I can call people, and a standalone camera to capture things worth remembering.
You are getting it my friend ;)
I feel this. A big part of an actually cool traveling experience is not knowing exactly how you're going to do things and honestly getting lost, which is really hard if you have a device that lets you Uber (or the equivalent in the country) from whatever random little street you're on to your nice(?) hotel and skip everything in between. Ofc the trade-off is safety, but anyone with some degree of street smarts should be safe in most popular tourist destinations
I prefer to keep it on me and use it sparingly. Having my phone has allowed me to do things more efficiently, but yeah I like to try and get around without it. Also can be detrimental to rely on the phone as google maps once told me to take some streets in a major Central American city, but I decided not to. Told our guide the next day and he said I’m extremely lucky because if I went that way, I most definitely would have been robbed at a bare minimum. The police station there had been firebombed a week before we arrived, so tensions were already higher than usual
I agree that bribing a "dumb phone" is the smart way to go.
I feel you bro, it's better without it, but what gets me more than the directions/photos thing is the social media stuff. part of the reason I don't have it (my wife does but hasn't posted in 6 years). went to europe twice this year, first trip was mostly phoneless, I spoke the language and never turned on my service, people I went with weren't about social media. next trip I didn't speak the language and still didn't turn on service, but the group was way more obsessive about instagram and stuff, definitely took away from it but at the same time, if I let myself get annoyed just because the girls we were with couldn't stop taking photos, that'd be a little unbecoming, so I would just ignore them and find other things nearby. example - walking back from one of the best meals I've ever had and two of our party wanted to take photos of some something they saw in a hashtag, my wife and I split off, got a cocktail at a cafe and just watched the world go by and marveled at the intricate tiles on the sides of the buildings. it's possible to be a digital minimalist in a modern tech obsessed world, just takes a little effort and not giving a fuck about what others are doing
One thing I'd also recommend (depends on the safety of the country though) is taking local transit instead of Ubers, etc. It's a lot cheaper, can be a lot more convenient, and you get a good "slice of life" look into locals' lives. Knowing how to read a map is really useful and will pay dividends for the rest of your trip if your phone dies and you're lost. You'll have a bunch of photos in the cloud then but you won't care about that then.
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