Internet cafes were so central to the lives of long-term travelers 20 years ago that my memories of vagabonding through Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s are inseparable from occasional stop-offs in these little storefronts full of dial-up-connected computer terminals.
At the time, internet cafes felt revolutionary in their ability to connect travelers with home and the world beyond (as well as with local folks who, if they did not have a computer at home, would drop in to surf the internet, play video games, and chat up the international clientele). These days they have become harder to find, since their utility has been almost completely replaced (for travelers and local people alike) by smartphones.
Curiously, I don’t have any photos of myself using an internet cafe amid their 1996-2002 heyday. This photo is from a makeshift internet cafe that had been set up at the 2006 Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, and the whole setup looks much cleaner and high-tech than the frumpy storefront and hostel-room terminals I’d used on the backpacker trail a few years prior.
It will be interesting to note, twenty years from now, what might seem strange, in retrospect, about our current technological moment as travelers.
The ways technology both expands and limits our experience as travelers is something I explore in several chapters of The Vagabond’s Way.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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