Traveling With Laptop | To Bring or Not To Bring?
© 2009 Wazari Wazir | My Temporary Mobile Office | Istanbul | Turkey
Whether to bring laptop or not during traveling, you need to ask yourself this simple question, why do you need to carry a laptop in the first place? If you are working as a travel writer and need to email your article on the road, then maybe having a laptop will be handy but on the other hand if you only intended to use your laptop for emailing, skype, facebooking, backup some photos, then maybe you should not have bring it with you.
I personally don’t bring a laptop when traveling on personal traveling. I only bring a laptop during an official photography assignment, other than for backup, I need to send some of the pictures to my department on daily basis, and I need to do some editing as well. Off course I can do all those thing at a cyber cafe but it will be convenient for me to do all those stuff from the comfort of my hotel room.
Nowadays most travellers have a smartphone with them, so if you wanted to get in touch with your family back home, you can always use a free WiFi connection that are widely available at most backpackers hotel. You don’t need to add another burden to your backpack by carry a laptop.
Normally I will bring with me plenty of memory card, CF card for my camera when traveling, so I rarely need to transfer my picture to a laptop to clear some space. Memory cards are cheaper nowadays. If you wanted to do some backups, I will suggest you to carry a mobile hard disk, 250GB – 500GB in capacity will be more than enough. You can then use cyber cafe to transfer your photographs to your mobile hard disk. It’s small and will not add a lot of weight to your backpack.
When traveling I rarely have time to be online, instead of wasting my time on the internet at cyber cafe or at the hotel room, I would rather go for a walk or take some photograph outdoors. Every second is so precious when you are on the road. You will have plenty of times to get online when you get back home, just get online to keep in touch with your family members and then move on.
I’ve never regret for not carrying a laptop with me while traveling, in fact I feel much more enjoyable without it. I can spend more time outdoors and need not to worry about the safety of my laptop at the hotel, I can travel with peace.
To sum it all up, taking a laptop with you sometimes becomes a necessity and sometimes it will only be a burden to you. If you have a solid reason on why you need a laptop, then take it with you, on the other hand if you think, you “might” need it, then, probably, you don’t really need it. Leave it at home and travel with peace and most importantly travel light, especially if you keep on moving from once place to another.
