Pulling up anchors is a nice analogy for how it felt while we were on the ship. Even though I “cheated” by bringing a satellite modem with us, it seemed like we were between worlds when we were en route. We had no address, no phone number, no job, no face-to-face contact with anyone besides the crew, nowhere to go besides the ship. So I found it funny that our first order of business after we found a place to stay in Auckland was finding a SIM card for our cellphones.
Let me back up and say that I did some research on international cell phones before we left, learned a little bit about the various GSM bands, and eventually found a sleek GSM quad-band flip phone online for only $40. It was branded AT&T all over, but it was unlocked. I got a gray one, Stephanie got a red one. We threw them into our bag of electronics without so much as turning them on.
Suffice it to say, I was completely ignorant of the world of SIM cards. Does a SIM card come with a phone number? Are all SIM cards the same size? Do they cost money? How do you add minutes/dollars to it? Thankfully we got a little coaching from Jeoffrey on the Cap Cleveland, who has SIM cards for every port (so he can call home). We even bumped into him at the mall, and he accompanied us to the Vodafone store to show us the ropes.
SIM card and cell phone
A pre-paid SIM card does come with a phone number (we now have NZ phone numbers), SIM cards are all the same size, Vodafone’s SIM cards cost $30 NZD, and we add money to the card (aka “topping up”) by buying “top ups”, which have a code that we text to a customer service number (for free) to add to our account. We both started with $20. It appears to cost 89¢/minute to make calls with it, which seems outrageously expensive, but when we call international landlines, it’s a $2 flat fee for up to 60 minutes, which seems outrageously cheap (for all calls over 3 minutes). Go figure. Text messages are 20¢ a pop.
Originally, we figured the phones would be most useful for the two of us to coordinate with each other if we were ever off doing separate things. That may eventually be the case, but so far they’ve been most useful for the types of things they’re useful for at home—calling family, calling local businesses with inquiries, and receiving calls from people who are trying to coordinate with us (while we’re out and about).
We are currently at 15° 14′ 54.77″ N 75° 15′ 12.63″ W, somewhere between Jamaica and Colombia, en route to Cartagena, Colombia. We should be arriving there tomorrow afternoon. I am posting this (and anything else that begins with GPS coordinates) using a Wideye Sabre 1 BGAN Terminal (or in layman’s terms: a satellite modem).
When we started planning this trip, I had resigned myself to a month without access to the internet. It sounded like a badge of courage when people asked me, “So, does the container ship have wireless?” and I answered: “Nope.” The last time I didn’t have access to the internet for 28 days straight was probably before I had access to the internet at all.
I’ll admit, I am weak. I did some cursory looking into satellite phones, Iridium and such. But they were just blindingly expensive. And I didn’t want to make calls, I just wanted an IP address! Eventually I stumbled upon Inmarsat’s BGAN, which stands for Broadband Global Area Network. Unlike the various satellite phone options, many of which only guaranteed coverage on land, BGAN covers the whole planet, continents and oceans, with the exception of the poles. It was almost too good to be true.
Given our upcoming trip, I wanted to get the word out to my extended family (parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even some close second-cousins) that Stephanie and I would no longer be living at our current address. Instead they could reach us via email or follow along on our blogs.
I liked the idea of doing it by postcard—something memorable that they could put on the fridge—but I assumed there probably weren’t many container ship postcards to choose from out there. Which meant only one thing: I’d have to make my own.
I’d recently stumbled upon Postful, a neat web-to-mail service that generates real physical mail and postcards from the web (for a nominal fee plus postage, of course). I was eager to have a reason to try out the service, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. They don’t do international postcards (yet), so this test was limited to my US-based family.
For the message on the back, I figured I’d just embellish my Big Adventure post with a few contact details and then be off to the races. However, once I’d crafted the perfect message, I got the following inscrutable error message: field text will overflow. Translation: too much text to fit on the back of a postcard. Ok… Unfortunately there was no indication of what a reasonable amount of text would be, or where the text was getting cut off. I made at least a dozen revisions, trimming a phrase here, a sentence there, and each time, the same error. It was a little frustrating.
Eventually I pared the message down to a mere three sentences plus contact info, and the text was accepted—115 words using 639 characters—at long last with a nicely rendered version of the back of the postcard. Now that I knew what I had to work with, I was able to further tweak the text to use the space more effectively.
My Grandmother might be confused by the concept of “Snail” mail
The final step was to enter or upload addresses. They offered a convenient CSV-upload option, which gave me a reason to get everyone’s contact info in one place. I uploaded the file, and voila, 16 households were about to get my “junk” mail (all for only $9.44). I also had one sent to myself just to see how long it took, and what the quality was like.
I placed my order on August 1, and it arrived in San Francisco roughly a week later, on August 10. The print quality was good, but the paper wasn’t exactly postcard-stock. It was lower-gloss and a bit thinner than your typical tourist fare. But still, it did the job, and looks mighty fine on our fridge (while we still have one).
start a new two-year contract, costing more per month than my current plan, to get a basic, albeit heavily-rebated cellphone
buy the cellphone for its full MSRP of around $160
I kind of think of these as “taxes”. Carrier lock-in on one hand, or price-gouging on the other. Both of which I wanted to avoid. The guy at the Sprint store suggested that I check around Craigslist and eBay for someone selling their old phone.
Sure enough, someone on eBay was selling a Samsung A840 for $10 + $7 shipping. It was used, yes, and there’s always a risk that someone is selling stolen phones (though I’m guessing that’s more a problem with iPhones and Blackberries), but the seller, Legacy Wireless, seemed reputable. So for a mere $17, I got a new phone (well, new to me) without having to start a new contract.
At the San Francisco WordCamp today I got to see Richard Stallman give his free software talk and then perform his crowd-pleasing St. IGNUcius bit. I don’t usually do this, but afterwards I stuck around so I could get my picture taken with him.
