Keeping In Touch On The Road
Is Becoming Easier Each Day

Keeping in touch is a good idea, wherever you travel. It may be tempting to cut ties and wander off into the blue yonder, but contact is often part of that journey - either to keep those ties back home warm, or only for safety's sake. If you're a woman backpacking on your own you should make sure someone, somewhere knows where you are.

I love the solitude, the serenity and the stillness of being cut off from the familiar but wander too far and some heartstrings pull me back.

I still remember the excitement of checking for mail at the poste restante every time I reached a city, of leaving messages at the American Express office, picking out postcards and handing in films to develop.

Today, many of these habits seem quaint and reaching out to friends and family back home is downright easy - nearly instant, in fact.

The times they are a-changin

Many of today's modern communications haven't been around that long. Long distance calling from some countries even a decade and a half ago was a complex affair, before the use of calling cards became widespread.

Email followed quickly, but in the mid-1990s, not that many people had it yet. In some countries, my early version laptop caused commotions, and I became a gathering point for dozens of young people jostling for a peek at the screen.

Even using email meant wrapping a strange-looking implement around a phone receiver and waiting endlessly for two or three emails to make their way down the line. Compuserve was the email of choice, and we used numbers to identify ourselves rather than names.

Pretty soon Internet cafés popped up along the backpacker trail and the electronic age went from a few daring pioneers to the mainstream.

These days, keeping in touch means taking your own phone with you, texting back and forth, or even better (or worse!), tapping your message on your Blackberry from the bottom of your tent. If you're worried about being cut off - and yes, that can still happen in some parts of the world - you can always buy a satellite phone. They're coming down in price every day.

Today, keeping in touch is a cinch.

It's easy to create a travel blog and share our trip as we go from country to country.

We can sit at our screen and be in immediate contact by using a webcam or chatting on Skype.

We can post our whereabouts on Facebook or My Space or any other social networking site, along with photos - and even videos - we've taken with our phone.

If you want something just a bit better, a digital camera will do the trick. And if you're not an expert photographers, a few beginners photography tips should be enough to get you started. If you still want more, I've listed some must do's and don'ts of travel photography here at travel and scenic photography 101.

But not everyone loves new technology.

Are you the old-fashioned kind?

There's nothing wrong with old-fashioned! And sometimes, old-fashioned works best.

If you're not the blogging kind, one way to record your travels is to keep a travel journal. I have several dozen journals I've kept over the years - unfortunately, they don't cover my earlier trips. If I'd realized how much pleasure I would get from opening their gritty and often waterlogged pages, I would have started writing them far earlier.

Many of my journals are more scrapbooks than journals, with bits of leaves, cloth, feathers, menus, articles, business cards I've picked up along the way - anything that jogs my memory about a time or place.

Keeping in touch isn't only fun - it's often a necessity. The only question is how.