Lostinasia's Gizmo report after one month in India

lostinasia

Just returned from my first trip to India--Varanasi and Rajasthan for about a month. Some comments on technological issues...

Before this trip, I shame-facedly bought my first-ever travel adaptor. Sigh. I’ve never needed to plug anything in before. However, I’d just bought a digital camera, and I was taking my cell phone as well.

Having a plug adaptor was enough. It’s some tiny flimsy pink thing with two round prongs. There are TWO common adaptors available that have two round prongs—the one for India is a little bit closer together, with slightly fatter prongs. I didn’t need any kind of voltage adaptor. I’m not sure if this was luck, the marvels of modern technology, or happy coincidental matching between Taiwan and India. It never seemed to be the snug plug & socket fit I’m used to from Canada and Taiwan, but I looked at appliances in India, and none of those seemed to fit in the plugs properly either!

The camera: Panasonic FZ3 with a 35-420mm equivalent zoom. Wonderful and lots of fun although I’m darkening a lot of the shots with computer software—I guess the Indian sun is bright, and once on my computer a lot of my photos look a little washed out. Charging the batteries (definitely take two!) was easy and typically took an hour or two.

I have no idea why I am suddenly incapable of keeping the horizon straight; perhaps I should use the viewfinder rather than the screen? The plastic cover for the LCD screen is a little skewed; maybe that messes up my perspective. Software fixes this, but at the cost of some cropping and time. The camera is smallish—fits in a jacket pocket, but not in a shirt pocket. Combining that with a big zoom is COOL—getting pictures of people at a distance was easier than it’s ever been before (because it doesn’t look as intimidating as my 28-200mm SLR), and for the first time in my life I’ve got bird pictures which have birds rather than specks!

I took two memory cards at 512MB each, the rationale being one and a half would fill a CD so I could burn when one card was full and the next was underway. However, it didn’t quite work out that way…

Shops everywhere could burn CDs for me, and they had no trouble with the SD cards, although I wish I’d brought high quality CDs with me. Something I didn’t know (and to be honest only have learned anecdotally—perhaps someone here can confirm): your memory card can pick up viruses when you get the CDs burned. All I know is, after burning a CD, I didn’t format a memory card—I manually erased most of the photos because I wanted to save a couple to show other people on the road later, kind of a “Here’s what you’ll see!” thing. And then a day or two and 200 photos later (my photo taking SHOT UP with digital—not that it’s improved any!), suddenly the photos I’d taken disappeared, although when I checked on a computer later the memory was still being used. When I tried to use the memory card again, it was totally unusable. Now I’m home: I got some software, easily retrieved the photos off the card, and the formatted the card. Now it works fine.

A couple of the photos I’d been trying to keep on the camera, amongst river shots of the Ganges at Varanasi, were of the more intriguing and gravity-defying positions at Khajuraho. I knew internet porn comes loaded with lots of viruses, but 11th century temple porn?!

The cell phone: this could take 12-20 hours to charge!!! I have no idea why. I bought a SIM card with Hutch when I was in Delhi—about 1000 Rp, with 800 Rp or so for calling time.. I used the phone mainly for text messaging along the lines of “Having fun and still alive”, and receiving text messages in turn. This was really nice actually, because it saved me the hassle of going online for 20 minutes to type an e-mail message with basically the same content. Most of the internet connections were SLOW—I saw one woman trying to upload her photos, and each photo was theoretically going to take an hour or so, assuming the power didn’t cut. And that’s a foolhardy assumption in India. The Hutch account worked ok, although I had no service in Jaisalmer or Orchha. Apparently I could only recharge it in Delhi, which was an unpleasant but money-saving surprise (of course, the salespeople I talked to in Agra may have been wrong). SMS cost 5Rp for international, I think, and to and from Taiwan was basically instant—none of the daylong waits I’ve heard other people suffer.

Calling within India was just plain funny. No one knows what the phone numbers are—for one hotel, I had a business card, with the printed number crossed out and another one added in hand; neither of these were the same as the number in my guidebook, although I asked them and discovered that HAD been the number before. Good luck to you. Making reservations with e-mail proved much more practical.

Lostinasia's packing report after one month in India.

Lostinasia's "discomforting stuff" report.

Reporting after a month in India (transport).

Edited by steven_ber to add links to other threads.

edwardseco

Using the lensfinder will help and turning off the LCD will save battery life..