Travelers make use of a local internet cafe to keep in touch

The days of collecting outdated letters from poste restante are gone. Instead, travelers can now access their e-mail accounts from just about any town in the world. For better or worse, the advent of cybercafes has made it possible to stay in constant contact with home.

Finding a cybercafe is easy. Just ask. Ask at the front desk of your hotel. Ask at a backpacker's hostel or at the nearest luxury hotel's business center. But, if you prefer to plan ahead, you can buy a book or create your own destination-specific guide.

Two guidebooks to cybercafes,Cybercafes: A Worldwide Guide for Travelers by Catherine Stanton, and Internet Cafe Guide: Cybercafe Yellow Pages by Ernst Larsen, cover the entire planet. But unless you're going on an around-the-world excursion, you'll be carrying deadweight for the sake of a few chapters. Plus, the books list only a few cybercafes in most cities, and new ones open up everyday.

RESOURCES

Cybercafes.com
Another directory of cafes

Cybercafe Search Engine
6,062 cybercafes listed worldwide

easyinternetcafe Slick new chain of European Cybercafes, now in the US.

Australian Internet Cafes

Head to Head test of the Guides

GoNOMAD wanted to see what the difference is between two of the most popular cyber cafe websites. We searched for internet cafes in Massachusetts, Barbados, and Belarus.

The results were not the same: Internet Cafe Guide (ICG) displayed nine cafes in our home state of Massachusetts. Cybercafes.com (CC) displayed just seven. Both cafes included Boston's Designs for Living, but CC's listing showed an out of date email address and no website. ICG left out the cafe's website but go the other information correct.

Both directories misspelled "Northampton," (which leads us to conclude that there is more than a little "information sharing" going on between them) One advantage ICG has is a date showing the last update that occurred in July 2002. Nothing indicated this same updating information on CC.

Down in Barbados, ICG provided us with six cafes. CC lists just three there. ICG has the correct prices, verified by the cafe in Bridgetown, and CC's were wrong.

All in all, we'd recommend ICG as the better of the two directories.

To create your own up-to-date cybercafe guide for your specific travel destinations, check out the searchable Internet cybercafe databases listed at right. Print out your own list, noting locations, costs and hours.

And don't forget to get a web-based e-mail account (such as Hotmail or Yahoomail) before you go. You can configure it to check your home account with the help of your Internet service provider. AOL subscribers can check e-mail through aol.com.

Safe Travels and Safe Surfing!

Copyright 2006. Marie Javins. All rights reserved

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