Touring with Tech
Visiting a new city abroad and being a tourist always presents a problem for me. As a Londoner, I see plenty of slow walking goggle-eyed tourists who don’t know where they are going or are eating in the most awful tourist-targeted restaurants such as Aberdeen Steakhouses on Piccadilly Circus. How completely disappointing for them. In an attempt to avoid the usual tourist pitfalls, I equip myself with an minor arsenal of technology to help me whilst visiting new cities.
MAPS:
Perhaps the most useful of all of these is my iPhone. You can still use your GPS whilst data roaming is switched off meaning you can avoid the download costs (£6/mb!) associated with using the native Google Maps application. Instead, you can download the excellent OffMaps which allows you to download entire city maps to your iPhone. Until recently you used to be able to select the map area you would need drill down to the street level (akin to the closest zoom on GMaps) but now instead you download entire city guides (the first two are free). This is actually a lot more useful as the guides let you search by street name and also have suggested bars, museums etc… I was concerned about roaming the narrow alleys of the Old City in Barcelona without the best zoom level on the map but it wasn’t a problem at all - each of the streets is denoted by smaller dotted lines.
WHERE TO GO:
Despite OffMaps offering a guide, it doesn’t give you recommendations on where to go. For this I rely on a few guidebooks I trust in paperback that have made it onto the small screen: Wallpaper and Lonely Planet (these were free during the ash cloud mayhem).
However, in order to try and make sure I wasn’t just avoiding Aberdeen Steakhouses but actually going to great venues, I look for a local’s view of the town. Not For Tourists (not yet available for Barcelona) and Nike’s True City both promise guides written by city ‘insiders’ (though True City seemed a bit light on content). Most of these apps have maps built-in though they are buried in the app so they are not as useful for a quick check on directions or location as OffMaps.
With real-time recommendations you have the ability to see what everyone recommends (not just elite Nike elected cool kids). I found Foursquare great for finding tips and venues on places to go nearby that may have just opened or may not be in the guides. Gowalla also offers ‘Trips’ in case you are looking for a themed itinerary from a local such as Central Park highlights, Ghost Walks, or Food Market tours. Who needs a book when locals can update you with their own tours?
One more avenue to check is InTheMo. The idea is that they take local recommendations and mash them into a personalised concierge service for you based on what you like, not on what others like. Itt’s still very nascent but worth a look.
PHOTOS:
One bit of tech I’d like to use but have not stumped up for is a Eye Fi SD card for my DSLR. Eye Fi were introduced a few years ago with the ability to wirelessly transfer your images to your computer over WiFi. They have now extended their product range to include cards that can do this without a wifi network. But more importantly, they also geo-tag your photos. I love this innovation - the ability to see where and when you took your photos and essentially create a map of your travels. It’s a great idea that bring me neatly onto…
TRACKING:
If you want to keep a log of where you’ve been on your travels or simply just keep your freinds and family up to speed, you can track yourself. I used the Trip Journal app for iPhone. It lets you track yourself continuously (great for when multi-tasking is released in the next OS update, but battery sapping), or create waypoints when and where you wish. You can take photos with your iPhone camera and add them along the way. Once you’re done you can either export your trip to Google Earth or, much more practically, to Facebook for your friends to see. Brill.
HOW TO GET AROUND:
The iPhone can help you find out where to go and there are a plethora of apps to tell you how to get there, but it won’t take you there yourself. Tech can only go so far for that but I did manage to do something I had seen in San Francisco but didn’t get the opportunity to try: Go Car. Go Cars are little orange two-seater buggies powered by a moped engine. This means they are painfully slow to accelerate and handle hills, however when they do pick up steam, they do go well. But the whole point of being a tourist is taking your time to see the town so why speed around? The real draw of GoCars is that they are GPS enabled. You can take one of several tours and the friendly sat-nav voice tells you where to turn to take you the sights you want to see. You pay for the amount of time you take the buggy out for and you can go wherever you want but the sat-nav will only tell you where to go when you return to one of the preset routes. It is worth noting there is no screen so you need to use a paper map if you want to go off piste. We took a 3 hour tour to the Tibidabo which is high up in the hills overlooking Barcelona (512m above sea level) and whilst the GoCar had a lot of difficulty getting up the hills, we did manage to make it without getting out to push it (which your sat-nav suggests you may need to do!). In the photo below you will see we aren’t big guys - had we been bigger, perhaps we would have needed to push. But the real point of the photo is the view. In order to get there any other way, we would have had to take a train and a bus or a taxi. GoCar was much more fun and rewarding, if a little hairy. They aren’t inexpensive and as the meter is effectively ticking from the minute you leave the depot, you will need to strike a balance between how long you spend at the sites you are taken to, and how many of these sites you want to see. But they are great fun and we had other tourists looking on enviously and even taking photos of us. I’d definitely recommend them if you can split the cost with a friend.
