I just got back from a 2 week vacation in Egypt with my girlfriend Sindy. This was the first time I have extensively traveled with the iPad and for the most part it was a great experience.
The Trip (condensed form)
First you need the context of our trip as it traversed the full spectrum of travel, from comfortable and predictable to digging a hole in the ground for a toilet and “oh my god were we just kidnapped?”. We spent only two days in Cairo to see the most popular sights, the pyramids, the museum, and the bazaars. Although Cairo is an amazing city, it is just another urban sprawl, and we were itching to get into an adventure.
The Route
From Cairo we took an overnight train to Aswan and stayed two nights. In Aswan we visited the great Abu Simbel temples, had dinner in a Nubian village and relaxed. We departed from Aswan on a felucca, a traditional Egyptian sail boat capable of carrying about 12 people with no internal areas. We slept on the felucca on the shore of the Nile, and in the morning finished our ride in Luxor.
Felucca-ing down the Nile
Luxor is filled with ancient sites such as the Karnak Temple and the Valley of the Kings. After two days in Luxor we started the arduous journey to the desert. The journey is far too long to do in one sitting so it consists of many stops in small towns.
The first leg was a 9 hour drive to the Dakhla Oasis, a basic town in the middle of the desert. After only one night it was back on the road for 5 hours until we reached the small town of Farafra. The only reason we stopped in this nondescript town was to wait out the sun, for the next leg of the trip consisted of swapping our bus for a 4WD Jeep and heading straight into the desert.
Barreling through the Sahara on one of these is crazy fun.
After another 4-5 hours of driving and sight seeing we were setting up camp in the White Desert just in time for the sun to set. In this case camping means just throwing our sleeping bags on the sand; no need for tents here, but watch out for foxes and giant beetles. After smoking shisha and singing around a fire all night we slept under a million vibrant stars and counted shooting stars until we fell asleep. We were up first thing in the morning and on the road heading to Bawiti, a necessary stop on our way to Siwa.
An 8 hour drive brought us to the Siwa Oasis near the Libyan border. Due to its proximity to Libya everything going into and out of Siwa is highly controlled, which means one must pass through many checkpoints along the way. Siwa was by far the most conservative city we visited in Egypt with most women donning a burqa. At the same time there was a bit of a hippy feel to the city, including a little cafe that played tons of Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones.
Sunrise from our desert camp
After two days in Siwa we were on the road again heading to Alexandria on the Mediterranean. Alexandria is a beautiful modern city with tons of sites and culture to explore. True story: we were nearly kidnapped our last night here (I’ll tell you about it later). I wish I had more time to spend here, but after two days we had to take a train back to Cairo, and then it was a flight back to New York.
The Hardware
Each of us brought our own iPad: my 16GB WiFi iPad and Sindy’s 32GB 3G. The only other electronics we packed were our iPhones (both 3Gs), my Nikon D80 camera with two lenses, and the camera connection kit.
WiFi was ubiquitous throughout Egypt. Most hotels had wifi in the lobby for a small fee (5-10 Egyptian pounds, ~1-2 USD), and many museums, libraries and attractions had free wifi.
Ruggedness
The iPad gets an unexpected win in the category of ruggedness. As you read, our trip was quite an adventure. An overnight felucca ride on the Nile, nearly 20 hours of 4 wheel drivin’ through the desert, camping in the White Desert without tents, train rides, bus rides, camel rides, donkey rides, etc. Our iPads were with us the whole time protected only by a plastic ziplock bag in case of water damage.
Never once did I worry about the iPad’s safety. I would take it out for a moment, look something up and then throw it back in my bag. It’s slim profile made it easy to slip into any opening in my backpack or daypack. It’s solid one piece construction and lack of external buttons made me that much more comfortable throwing it around knowing that there was nothing that could break off or snag on something inside my backpack.
The iPad’s lack of edges and seams is also a huge plus. I would not have busted out a laptop or netbook in the middle of the desert because cleaning out sand from under the keys and crevices would have been a pain in the ass. But just a quick wipe down of my iPad and it looked brand new.
Camera Connection Kit
The camera connection kit is awesome. The RAW images in my Nikon D80 weigh in at around 10.5MB per image, and I survived the trip with only a 4GB SD card. Every night I would dump the entire memory card to Sindy’s 32GB iPad, which allowed me to take over 1,600 images in total. Looking over the day’s photos before going to sleep became a bit of a ritual.
I also carried my Flip HD recorder, and shot over an hour of video. There was still plenty of room on the recorder by the end of the trip, but there is nothing like being able to transfer the videos to the iPad and watch them at full resolution at the end of a long day (only iOS 4.2 will play videos imported from the camera kit).
My biggest complaint with the camera kit is speed. It takes on average 11 seconds to transfer one RAW image from the memory card, which means nearly 30 minutes for a full transfer on heavy shooting days. This could be because the iPad creates jpeg thumbnails of the images as it transfers, but I still want better performance. Luckily you can exit the photos app and do other things while the photos are transferring even without iOS 4.2 multitasking.
Another annoyance is the inability to view the full size images right off the memory card without importing them into the Photos app. The camera kit has the potential to be the greatest card reader in existence. At one point a fellow traveler wanted to show me some images from his trip, and it would have been great to pop in his card and browse the photos. Another use for this would be the ability to delete subpar photos directly from the memory card rather than importing and then deleting.
The camera kit desperately needs compatibility with the iPhone and iPod touch. Ideally I should be able to carry just my camera, iPhone and connection kit, and when I need to clear my memory card just whip out my phone and dump the images. I would never pull out my iPad and do a transfer in the middle of a shooting session. It’s just too bulky and I was shooting in some very sketchy areas.
For transferring the photos to your computer I suggest using Apple’s Image Capture application instead of iPhoto, which I found to be glitchy and slow.
Mobile iWork
Pages and Numbers for the iPad really impressed me on this trip. In fact, I wrote the majority of this blog post in Pages while flying back to New York. It could have just as easily been written in Notes.app, but seeing headers and pictures right in the document made it easier for me to structure the post. I also used Pages to keep a brief journal of some of the memorable stories that happened. Again this could have been done in Notes.app, but I could enhance the journal by adding pictures from the day.
During our layover in Rome Sindy remembered that she forgot to create and send an important report to her colleagues. It was amazing to watch the fluid back and forth switching between Mail.app, Numbers and Goodreader, pulling data from one app, entering it into another. Within an hour she had a moderately complicated spreadsheet put together, formulas and all, and thanks to the recent Numbers update she could mail off an Excel file before we boarded our flight to Cairo.
Sindy is a bit of a work-a-holic
Reader
I used the iPad quite a bit for reading, but unfortunately iBooks was useless to me. Most of the documents I wanted to read were in PDF format, and iBooks as a PDF reader is crap. It really needs to provide access to the PDF’s metadata (e.g. table of contents), as well as a better way to organize documents instead of the bookshelf metaphor. So, for my reading needs I turned to Goodreader. It’s user interface can be a challenge sometimes, but it’s organizational capabilities and PDF metadata access makes it indispensable for me.
Outside of the few non-fiction books and novels I am in the middle of (Rework, Being Geek and Cat’s Cradle), I also loaded a bunch of travel books into Goodreader (Lonely Planet guides, historical books, web clippings). Having multiple travel books on the iPad was very convenient and a better experience than the dead tree version. Searching and annotating the book is much easier, and flipping back and forth between different books was painless.
IsoCards
I already have a more detailed blog post on this topic, but I want it to be known that IsoCards is awesome for traveling. It doesn’t matter how bumpy the ride or how harsh the environment, I could always play a game of poker with friends.
Most Used Apps
Here is a list of the apps I used the most on the trip, and the ones that just really surprised me at how useful they are.
- Pages: Great for writing this very blog post and keeping a journal of the unforgettable moments from the trip.
- Goodreader: An excellent e-book/PDF reader, if slightly cumbersome.
- Ludo, IsoCards, any board game simulation: Nothing like being able to play card games and board games on a bumpy bus or train ride with a group of friends. Also see my more detailed blog post about using IsoCards while traveling.
- OffMaps: I used OffMaps to download street maps of all the cities I visited so that I could easily find my way around while exploring.
- Numbers: Indispensable for Sindy so that she could get critical work done while away from her computer.
