Campervans for geeks… where are they?

July 5, 2008

I like traveling once in a while and seeing the sun and the sand. It doesn’t happen often but I really love it it when I get the chance. Among my varied geeky hobbies I enjoy photography and long drives up and down the Queensland and New South Wales coastline in Australia where I live. Usually just in summer, but I’ve been planning a trip to the snow sometime next year for something different. One thing that stops me doing this though is the fact that I can’t live without the internet for very long (I actually get quite stroppy and anxious, even worse than when I swear off caffeine!), so I want to find some geek friendly options for traveling and cheap accommodation.

Wicked Campers would obviously be my first choice because they’re a client of mine (http://www.chaostamed.com.au), which means I sometimes get free stuff and have the boss’ personal mobile number if anything goes wrong. I’m going to try to take the bias out of this post though. I’ve been trying since I started here to make a kit for geeks, or at least some links and info as to how to get a cheap transport and accommodation option whilst still having internet access. I did try once to kit out one of our campers with the geek essentials, but I haven’t had the time lately at work to put it together.

Anyway, the first thing you need is a good MP3 transmitter, although all the newer vans in the fleet have aux-in ports so you can plug your mp3 player directly into it. I’d like to take the credit for that addition to the vans but that one wasn’t mine. If you want to be prepared in either case, I recommend getting yourself an adapter that sits in the lighter socket so you don’t run out of power for it in the middle of the Australian desert. There’s plenty on ebay.

Secondly, you need a GPS. Navman’s are good, or you can get cheap Chinese import bluetooth gps recievers on ebay for around $40 that you can use with a laptop or some PDA’s. I’d go a Navman or TomTom if you aren’t willing to put hours into getting the latter option set up and just want to know how to get somewhere. If you want to know where you are, how fast you’re going, average k’s per day etc you will need to get one of those recievers and either find some open source software that can use them or write your own software. This post is for geeks, remember?

The next essential is mobile internet. This one’s a bit more pricey. You can get a plan from a mobile phone company called ‘3′ here in Australia for pretty cheap over-the-mobile-network-internet, however at the moment there’s no options to rent the hardware while you travel. With the modems costing anywhere up to $500 each, or having to pay out a 24 month plan when you finish your trip, this can be a major sticking point in your plans. I’m working on getting work to buy a couple of modems and plans and onsell mobile internet for some minor cost ontop of a camper hire, but it isn’t an option yet unfortunately.

You can rely on internet cafe’s and maccas wifi though, if you dont need to be online 24/7 like me. Telstra (one of the telephone giants here in Australia) has wifi internet hotspots all over the place, most notably in pretty much every Mcdonalds, and it’s pretty simple to get online through that as long as you either have a Telstra mobile phone plan or a credit card to pay your way.

Another thing I’ve always wanted to do is get a streaming webcam mounted somewhere in the van - for innocent intentions only ofcourse. The idea would be to mount it up the front of the van on the roof, pointing out the front windscreen. With that in place and a USB cable going to a laptop under the passenger seat, you could capture a timelapse of your entire journey! You could also park facing the sun somewhere and get a timelapse of the sun rise or set over a magestic Aussie beach or mountain range. If you’ve got a laptop (I recommend an Asus EeePC for backpacking!) and a car charger for it, this should be pretty easy to set up.

If you have all of the above you could actually setup a live video stream and gps tracking website for anyone who wants to follow your journey. Stay tuned as I try to get this stuff available to Wicked customers, if my boss will listen to me

In the meantime, you can still get all this stuff yourself before your camper adventure, and have a geeky backpacking holiday anywhere in Australia or NZ (or Europe, or Canada…). Let me know how it goes too!

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