I have an odd, and vaguely woolly attachment, to life without a smartphone, and life without data. And that’s not only because whenever I spend more than $15 on a phone I lose it within a fortnight (cocktails!). It’s because I value time offline, the chance to be in the moment, life unplugged. Plus, when push comes to shove, I can usually steal my spawn’s iPhone. That.

That said, after this China trip, I think I’m going to crack. Which will be great, because, according to the Bag Lady, Tinder is a bunch of fun, and you can’t do it from a laptop (I’ve tried), and, further, you can always switch off data if you don’t want to get email.

Also… Instagram. I may well be the last person who writes online not to be on Instagram. I’m fairly sure I’m a living fossil. And with all the eating and drinking and travelling and fabulous Bali living that I do, my Instagram feed would be cool as trousers. Or possibly just full of whining about builders.

Anywise, I digress. You see, there have just been too many times of late when a smartphone (and data) would have come in very handy. And the lovely folk at GO-SIM, who sell cards with international data for a fraction of the price of roaming on a typical UK contract, are actually paying me to list said occasions. Such as:

Persuading a Chinese Tuk-Tuk Driver a Museum Exists

With a smartphone, you can just pull up the name and address of a museum, even if it’s a rather obscure one, and hand it to the driver. Without a smartphone, you’re stranded outside the metro station explaining in pidgin Chinese that there really is a bowoguan, but unfortunately you only have an address in English, while he snarls at you incredulously in a honking Hangzhou accent until an English-speaking Chinese person comes along and rescues you. With their phone, obv.

This was the Low-Carbon Museum in Hangzhou, FYI. Which is, according to the tuk-tuk driver, a keguan, not a bowoguan, so there you go. It’s also COMPLETELY the other side of town – by which I mean two bus rides and all the way to the other end of the metro – from the Green Building Museum, something else that data might have told me. Had I looked, obviously.

Finding the Chinese Address of a Hotel

It’s a cliché of China travel that you really do need the Chinese address of wherever it is you’re going, unless you speak and read Chinese rather well. Knowing the English name and English address of a hotel is no bloody use at all without the Chinese characters (unless you’re lucky enough to be staying at an address like “Central Oxcart Road”, or “Shanghai Avenue”, or anywhere else whose components are sufficiently basic that even morons like me can read and pronounce them). While I used to have a workaround involving texting Chinese characters to my defiantly un-smartphone, life would be much, much simpler with a conventional smartphone, plus data. (Agoda, for all its excellent China coverage, just gives you the English address.)

Sharing Pictures

I’m a massive fan of the DSLR for taking proper pictures – although people can and do shoot print-quality images with iPhones, I like the ability to mess around with shutter speed and aperture value, and generally feel like David Bailey, particularly when the lens is big enough to get me into the photographers’ pen like a bona fide grownup (even if it’s not big enough to actually shoot what I need to capture from said pen). Still, for something instantaneous – like when you get on a train and see David Beckham advertising a Chinese Uber clone on the back of the seat – you just want to snap and tweet. You don’t want to get the camera out, take the lens cap off, set the settings, connect your camera to your laptop, process the picture, connect to wifi, and then share it hours later. That’s just masochistic.

Showing Tickets at the Airport

You can’t get into Departures at Denpasar airport without showing tickets. And we don’t have a printer at home – after lasting four years without one, it seems a ridiculous thing to own, like a steaming mound of electronic waste geared solely and exclusively to producing paper waste. Still, even with my high embarrassment threshold, I feel vaguely self-conscious pulling my MacBook out of its case and waking it up to show my tickets when everyone’s just brandishing smartphones.

Getting Around Town

Part of this work trip involved bar reviewing in Hong Kong – hard life, I know. And Central, on Hong Kong island, is an absolute maze of alleys and stairways and quick cuts round the back of skyscrapers. It’s challenging to negotiate sober in flat shoes, let alone in high heels after a cocktail or ten. Now, I’m an utter fan of a good, old-school paper map, but with something this hard to navigate a little flashing dot on a phone would be oh-so-handy, alleys all looking rather similar post-cocktails. Although, on the bright side, not having one is a great way to pick up acquire a partner in crime.

Ordering Chinese Food

Chinese food in China bears zero relation to most of what you’ll eat in the UK, and Chinese food names rarely match their English translations (perhaps because we find terms like “fish-smelling meat” unappetising). Without a smartphone, data and some food apps, even ordering basics like Dragon Well tea shrimp, Dragon Well tea prawns and Dongpo pork involved an awful lot of optimistic pidgin Chinese and waitstaff goodwill. This is also the case, I’d imagine, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, less-visited parts of Thailand, and, for that matter, most places where you don’t speak the language (or a very close relative, at least).

Telephony!

Given that I live in the steam-powered era, I have a Skype number that I use for international calling and messaging. And, yes, I know I need to get with the programme and use WhatsApp, or WeChat, or whatever fancypants application the kids use nowadays. But when you need to phone the type of hotel that doesn’t do online reservations, or text an interviewee to explain you’re trapped in a Buddhist ceremony and can’t do the call because of all the chanting, it’s just handy to have a phone that can do that, wherever you are.

Translation Tools

I arrived in mainland China effectively mute. Interestingly, I could still understand quite a lot of what was said, but I’d forgotten almost all my vocabulary (“hang on a sec” only started coming out in Chinese, rather than Indonesian, when I was back in Indo). I’d also forgotten all but one of the Chinese words for hotel, and all of the characters. Google Translate would have made my life unimaginably easier when enduring an epic hotel disaster in Shenzhen during floods.

Setting Up Interviews

When we were nomadic I a) worked less (nomadism being VERY considerably cheaper than supporting a child in an international school and a house with a swimming pool in Bali, fact fans), b) spent most of my time with my son and c) was focused on travel. It was, therefore, OK only to access email every so often. Nowadays, I work quite a lot. And, when you’re trying to set up interviews with ten different people for three separate stories, while moving between six different cities over a fortnight, mobile email is pretty much a must.

Not Being Weird

My choice of phone – still the $15 Nokia I bought in Borneo – is frankly, a fringe option (although I know several people on Bali who have them just because they’re impossible to lose and never run out of battery). Somewhere as status-obsessed as China, it’s verging on bizarre and, I realise forlornly, really rather unprofessional. Twenty-first century, here I come. #sigh

About GO-SIM’s International Data SIM

If you’re visiting a lot of countries over a short period of time, buying prepaid data cards for each one becomes a royal PITA, even when you have a language in common with the folk in the phone shop. GO-SIM, who specialise in international SIM cards, have a prepaid international data card – offering either 1GB or 200MB for 30 days – that works in over 50 countries, including pretty much all of Europe, the US, Canada and China, as well as pay-as-you-go international data, and data bundles.