Bringing your laptop on your overland travels to Africa; good idea or not? A laptop has definitely certain uses while traveling overland through Africa: you can download your photos, empty your memory stick and off you go, ready to snap away again. Take your laptop to a local internet cafe and use the web. A great advantage is here that you can safely use your internet banking which is not recommend on a computer shared by many at an internet cafe. Thirdly you can keep your travel blog up to date, put your photos on flickr.com or check whether the weather will be okay for your balloon flight over the Serengeti National Park.
There are downsides to bringing your valuable laptop out to Africa too. You now have a piece of luggage that you definitely don’t want to loose, this is not always handy if you end up shopping in Nairobi’s local market.
You will need to look after your laptop, in other words, keep it in a dust and shock proof bag. Don’t take it out in the middle of the desert!
You might also find that it is not always that easy in an internet cafe to log onto the web with your own computer. The time you spend figuring it out could be spend surfing the web on one of their computers.
The decision to bring your laptop on your overland travel is obviously completely yours. If you do bring it with you, make sure you make a back-up before you set off!
Happy Travels!
