The Art of Travel Blogging and Travel

-

We haven’t been traveling for very long yet and we have many growing pains to work through. Both with travel, technical aspects and with the blog.

We are learning quickly that there is an art to Travel Blogging.  It is one thing to run a travel blog when you are at home with time, technology and resources, it is quite another when you are traveling steadily, you don’t have reliable internet connections and you don’t have your secure jobs anymore to have an income coming in. When we were working, we could pay someone to fix our blog. Now we are on our own.

Here are some of the problems that we have encountered and some of the things that we have learned about Travel Blogging during the first part of our trip so far.

The Blog

We have never had to worry about how long we stayed at a place before or how often we need to get to the Internet, but now that we are working to become full time Travel Bloggers and professional travelers, we really have to look at our journey in a different way.

We have been sitting in Goa for over a week doing Yoga and relaxing on the beach, and we have realized that this doesn’t make for very interesting Blog Posts or newspaper articles. In the past, we wouldn’t have cared and we would have gone on with our days until we felt like moving on.

Now however, we have to take you, our readers into account.

It is time to move on.

As much as we have enjoyed relaxing, we have a goal to keep readers interested and to not ever have to go back to our old jobs. That goal is to make our Travel Blog strong and to build our brand as Canada’s Adventure Couple.  We need to generate an income through travel and we can’t do that sitting on a beach and taking afternoon siestas.

Patnem Beach, we love you! Swami Jee, we love your classes, Ramnad, Dinnesh, Raj and Pauin, you are the best. But we must leave in search of an adventure.

As for the Blogging.

I try to write 3 or more bog posts ahead of time, Dave goes through his photos to match the post and then when we go to the internet where we schedule our posts a week in advance. We are hoping to keep this system going.

Dave has started up his photography site and you can view more photos besides the photos that we post here at PictureThePlanet.com

We try to tweet and stumble a bit and have been working at trying to network with other Bloggers, but this has been difficult. There are only so many hours in the day and we want to experience out travels to the fullest.  We don’t want to spend hours surfing other blogs and miss out on our own experience, but at the same time we want to support our friends that are working hard at their fantastic sites!

Dealing with Technical Problems when Traveling

We managed to unlock our iPhone once and for all and we can now use it in India. See our iPhone hell post to find out how that all worked out.

Did you know that you can get a prepaid Internet stick for our computer with unlimited bandwidth in India?

We were so excited about that prospect that we went to town when we heard about it to buy one. It should be easy right?

Nope.

Vodaphone will not do a prepaid wireless stick. You have to have an address in India that they can send a bill to.

Idea – (the other large Internet provider) does prepaid sticks, but according to the guys at the desk, it is not compatible with Mac. Even though it says right on the box that it is. He just crossed that out with his pen and said that it wasn’t. Hmm, I guess that we will have to try somewhere else.

Reliance does prepaid also. But nobody can tell us what the coverage is like. They don’t know if it is nation wide and they also don’t know if it is Mac Compatible. We can’t find out if it is Mac Compatible unless we buy it.

The cost is 3800 Rupees ($88) to buy the stick and 1 month of Internet. It is not cheap and we are on a budget, so we are not in the mood to throw away $88 just to see if the Internet stick works. Especially after all of our iPhone hassels.

We have one more option and that is Airtel. We just haven’t found an outlet for them yet.

Buying a SIM or Internet stick in India…tip

You can’t just walk into a store to buy a SIM Card here in India. You need to have some paper work with you.

Don’t waste a ricksaw trip like we did. Bring these items with you when you buy your SIM.

• Photocopy of Passport
• Photocopy of India Visa
• Two Copies of Visa photos
• Business Card of hotel, with full address and phone number of place that you are staying in India
• Money.
• Patience. It sounds like a silly point to make, but you when you try to ask questions regarding any information, you will receive many blank stares.

The Travel Hurdles in India

We received some great advice early on in our trip and it has come true time and again. Always ask at least 3 different people the same question regarding anything. You will get three different answers, but one of them is bound to be right.

Even a simple question to do with food… “what comes with the chicken?” to which they will reply “chips.” You say “Oh, chips sounds nice, I haven’t had them in a while” When your chicken arrives… They bring your chicken with raw vegetables instead. You ask the same server about the chips and he says,”Oh No, chicken always comes with vegetables.“

The same goes for at the train Station,” Can We buy train tickets here?” “No, only in Margao.” Then you say “But you have a booth to book tickets with business hours? They happen to be right now, why do you have a booking office, if you can’t book tickets?” To which he says, “Nope, you cannot book here” as he looks past you to try to see the cricket match on the T.V.

Then you go back to town and try to book at an outlet and they tell you that you should book at the train station. You then say, “but they told me at the train that I cannot book there.” To which they reply “Oh no, you can book at the train station no problem. You then try to book online, it says that it takes credit cards from all nations. I guess Canada is not one of those nations because we try all of our cards and not one is accepted.

We must get out of Patnem, it is time for some adventure we owe it to you and ourselves! So we are chancing it tomorrow and are  going to try to hop on the 6:30 am train to Margao to hopefully catch the 8:00 am train to Hampi. But his is India and there are always wait lists. Getting on a train can be quite the ordeal. We will let you know if we make it!