Five reasons the Kindle is the best travel tool. Ever.

1. No more chopped up Lonely Planets

Most travelers seem to have a love/hate relationship with the Lonely Planet. The flexibility it allows for spontaneous changes to itineraries is wonderful but when you make that trek up the mountain in the snow to the highly-recommended ‘authentic’ beer hall, only to discover twenty other tables of tourists, each with a LP resting on the edge of the table, it lessens the experience somewhat.

When I lived in Japan, I trekked around with a hand-me-down 1994 edition LP, margins crowded with ten years of scribbled notes, highlights and post-its. The accommodation and food sections were roundly out of date but, unsurprisingly, details on two-thousand year old temples don’t change that often. This aligns with my preferred method for using the LP: to rely on it for historic summaries and the ‘what to see’ sections and outsource getting there and finding the best places to eat and stay to either the wonderful internet, or locals in the know. The Kindle is great at connecting these pieces.

For longer trips, particularly ones where you’ll be hitting a bunch of different countries in a short time: continental Europe and South East Asia being two classic examples, your options used to be limited to:

buying detailed guides for each of the countries you were going to, and then pre-booking a session at the physio for your return, to sort out those back pains you’d acquired from lugging four kilograms of guide books around. Maximum flexibly, maximum weight.
acquiring a compiled “best of” LP that scrimps on detail but has good overall coverage, usually the “on a shoestring” guides. Less detail, but less back problems.
making like MacGuyver and rolling your own, by chopping up and clipping together the bits of the books you needed. Great coverage, but limited flexibility.

None of these are ideal solutions.

The Kindle allows you to mash up all the above options into a single flow. Just grab the guide to countries or regions you’re traveling in and use the bookmarks feature to create a summary of the cities you’ll be visiting. You should also bookmark the relevant map pages, language chapters and specific transit information you need. If anything in your itinerary changes, just change up your bookmarks.

If you’re working from a couple of books, make yourself a new collection for travel. This also works for adding related books like language guides or recommended reading. Simple, searchable and super fast, it’s like having a customised travel guide that can be remixed on the fly. Supplement this with information from the internet (point 2) and some clever snippets (point 5) and use all the extra time you save chatting with locals at your destination, and you’ll be trailblazing in no time.

2. Free Internet, Anywhere

If you’ve got the 3g version of the kindle you can access the Kindle web browser from the experimental menu on the home menu which lets you interact with basic text webpages over local mobile networks. Not only does it free you from the tyranny of hotel internet, chasing wifi passwords and the traditional traveler’s ritual, ‘the midnight hunting of the internet cafe’ but it also gives you the option to switch up your itinerary on the fly, knowing that you can always keep in touch if you need to. This is brilliant.

It’s worked most places I’ve tried it, including remote Thailand, bits of China, and all over Europe. Obviously the further off the beaten track you are, the likelihood of a lack of coverage increases, but it’s still valuable for hub cities and airport layovers.

A good trick is to work out which of the services you use have a mobile or text-based version of their site and how to access it. In many cases prefixing the address with an ‘m.’ will do the trick as for Gmail (m.gmail.com), Twitter (m.twitter.com) and Facebook (m.facebook.com). All work well on the Kindle, and Gmail will also help by converting Word Docs and PDFs to a format that is readable on the device. Google maps isn’t wonderful, but works in a pinch, although you’re often better off going for the optimised maps in the LP if you’ve got it. Google translate and Babelfish both offer mobile-optimised versions of their translation tools, although text entry can be tricky for non roman character sets.

A fantastic site to remember is the mobile version of Wikitravel (m.wikitravel.org) which is essentially the world’s biggest travel guide to everywhere, available all the time. Like its older brother Wikipedia, it’s consistently improving, and finally seems to be getting quality information for most large and medium sized destinations, particularly for things to do and places to stay. How’s that for a freedom creator?

3. Break the Juice Addiction

These days the best seat in the hostel isn’t the one with the view or the comfy couch but rather the one in cable’s reach of the one power outlet. That would be the one with the people pacing up and down in front, eying it greedily, laptops clutched to their chests, like junkies in search of a fix. Everyone needs their juice.

The battery on the Kindle lasts forever comparative to other power-hungry mobile devices. I should probably caveat this point with “when the wireless is off the battery lasts forever” but even if you’re bashing away at GMail and Wikitravel at every opportunity, you’ll still get a good couple of days out of a full charge and, without wireless, you’re looking at weeks. So break the juice addiction and do your emailing from the top of a mountain, just because you can.

4. It Weighs Nothing

How is it that every single day you travel your backpack somehow seems to mysteriously acquire another couple of kilograms. For me, the culprit is usually books. When I’m on the road I plow through a couple of novels a week, and when you can only afford to carry a couple of them you become selective, hoarding the good ones until you find a hostel that has worthy replacements to swap. Loading the Kindle before I left and breaking free of the enforced crappy holiday reading cycle was a revelation, as was losing the extra baggage.

A couple of good things to remember is that tools like Calibre can bulk convert PDFs and load them onto to Kindle, in case you’ve got some academic reading you want to get through, and that there’s a tonne of free and out of copyright eBooks that I are in most cases going to be better reading than what’s on offer on the hostel shelf. Now we just need to work out what the hostels of the world are going to do with seven million unwanted copies of Stieg Larsson books.

If you need to lose even more weight from your pack, you can also load music (or audiobooks) into the music folder and play them, even when the Kindle itself is off. This works particularly well for language podcasts or lessons, such as Pimsleur. Leave the iPod at home.

5. Travel Snippets

I like to remember what I’ve done while I’m on the road, but I’m not a fan of the overwrought travel journal. I’ve found the Kindle version of the LP, in conjunction with the highlights feature, to be an amazing way of taking notes and finding a balance between the two. Once you’ve marked up the places where you’re going (see point 1) just drag a highlight over the place or thing you did, or over the city name for general things in that city, and type a few words against the highlight. You have begun to note your way to glory.

Now, when you stumble in the door after your global adventure, just plug the Kindle into your computer and find the My Clippings.txt file in the documents folder. You’ve got a play by play summary of your trip away sorted by date and city visited. You can then expand these at your leisure. Just promise you won’t email it to anyone. Okay?