Out Here

Friday, January 13, 2012

What the Heck is Hairtail? A Food Decoder for 2012 Silk Route Riders

For our first few weeks in China a lot of our meals will be in local restaurants and hotels. When we eat as a group in China we will order for the entire group. However when you are out cycling and want to stop at a restaurant you will need to order on your own.

In larger towns and cities restaurants may have english menus or pictures of the food on the wall that you can point too. You can also walk around the restaurant and point at what other people are eating, a slightly embarrassing but effective method of ordering. In many of the small villages we cycle though you will have to make due with hand signals and making animal noises to place your order.

Smartphone owners can always use one of the travel apps we recommended in a previous post but others might find this food decoder handy.

Our local guide, Zabi (pictured above in the green jacket), provided us with this food decoder to help make the ordering process a bit easier. Print it out and carry it with you on tour, I think you'll find it comes in pretty handy.

I've reached out to Zabi to find out what 'agaric' and 'hairtail' are, if you know please tell us in the comments.

Paul

Friday, December 23, 2011

The Best Smartphone Apps work offline. Here are 4 You Probably Haven't Heard Of and One You Probably Don't Use Enough

Image via Wikipedia

Travel can be intimidating. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know local customs and you have no idea how much things should cost. Figuring that stuff out is certainly part of the fun but wouldn’t it be nice if it was just a little easier?

Google Translate, maps, Wikipedia and other apps are great resources but try using them when roaming and your cell phone bill could rival the GDP of developing country. And if you traveling in out of the way places you might not have a data connection at all.

On a recent trip to China I tested several phone apps that work without a data connection to see how helpful they would be. I was in China for 3 weeks scouting a new route for our Silk Route Bike Tour. I travelled from Shanghai to Lanzhou though urban and rural areas alike. All 5 of these apps served me well.

When You Don't Speak the Language

Jibbiggo : Free app, $4.99 for each language pack in the Android Market, also available for iPhone
Jibbigo is a lot like Google Translate except that it works offline. The app itself is free but you have to pay for each language pack you download. The app uses about 14 MB of space on your phone. The Mandarin language pack I bought used 1.6 MB. This is the one downside to offline apps, you need to have adequate storage space on your phone.
Best Use
Your not going to use this app to have any in depth conversations but if you need to ask for a toilet in a hurry or order at a local restaurant it will do the trick. Over time you’ll even begin to pick up words so you can rely on the app less and less. It even has a history function so you don’t have to type in phrases you’ve used before.
One word of caution is to choose the words you want translated carefully. For example when I was looking for a bathroom I typed ‘washroom’ in to the app which translated to ‘shower room’ in Mandarin. When I entered the word ‘toilet’ however I got the right translation

When You Need to Navigate

NavDroyd $6.93 in the Android Market
NavDroyd uses Open Street Maps (OSM) to help you get around a city or country. Like Jibbigo you first install the app and then download the maps for the countries you are interested in. It used about 9 MB for the app itself and 56 MB for my maps of China.
Best Use:
The most useful feature for me was the ability to attach a ‘pin’ to my location. This allowed me to pin my hotel on the map then wander aimlessly through cites like Shanghai, Nanjing, Xian etc… without having to worry about how long it would take me to find my way home. I’d also use it to ‘pin’ items I wanted to return to later like a restaurant that looked good or market stall where I wanted to pick something up on the way back to the hotel. The level of detail was good enough that helped us to find a route around Lake Tai, something our paper chinese maps could not do.

When You Need To Change Money

XE Currency Exchange Free in the Android Market
Perhaps not useful for everyone but on our tours we cross a lot of borders at some pretty obscure border crossings. This often means dealing with some black market currency traders and it pays to know the official exchange rate. XE Currency allows you to update the rates when you have a wifi connection and then stores them offline for you.

Guidebooks and Info

Kindle Free in the Android Market and on Itunes
There are countless travel apps on the market and I’ve found many of them useful. But rather than clutter my phone with dozens of individual travel apps I’ve begun using the Kindle App. When Combined with a web service like Readability it really becomes a powerful travel tool.

Best Use
An easy use of the app is to download any guidebooks on the places you will be visiting and store them on your phone. Read them on the plane and use the Kindle’s notes and highlights feature to save the relevant bit for later reference. There are not a lot of guidebooks for Kindle yet but there are a few.
Used with the we service Readability the kindle app really becomes powerful. It allows you to send almost any web page to your kindle in a reader friendly format. You’ll need the paid version of Readability ($5 a month) but it is well worth it. You can then search the web for all the relevant bits of information you’d like to have on your trip and with a few clicks of the mouse send them to your phone to be referenced later. Brilliant.

Taking and Storing Photos

Light Box Free in the Android Market
Light box is currently my favorite photo app. It works as well as the stock camera app and it has several filters that allow you to alter your photo immediately after taking it.
Best Use
My favorite feature is the ability to caption and geo-locate each picture immediately after taking it. After a photo is taken a text box appears, type a quick description and save the photo. Later, when you have a wifi connection you can upload the photo to Twitter or Facebook using the previously typed caption as the text for the post. My only gripe is that when I download the photos to my laptop the text does not become the file name, that would be a nice feature.

So there are five of my favorites, tested and approved! I realize they are mostly for Android phones but that’s what I use and I hate to recommend something I haven’t tried myself. What are your favorites? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Paul

Paul McManus designs and guides long distance bike tours for Tour d’Afrique Ltd. His next trip will be the Silk Tour Bike Tour from Shanghai to Istanbul starting in May 2012. Find out more at www.tourdafrique.com.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

A 20 Room Hospital for 250,000 People

Arrow Web Hospital Helps 76,000 People a Year

The Arrow Web Team

Arrow Web Hospital has been a partner of the Tour d'Afrique Foundation since 2009. Founded in 2005 by four friends with money out of their own pockets the two room clinic has grown to a 20 room hospital in just 5 short years. Today their are still the only affordable health care provider in Africa's second largest slum.

A bit of History
In 2005 when Arrow Web first opened its small two room clinic they were the only provider of affordable care in Kibera, a 2.5 square km slum in Nairobi that is home to more than 250,000 people.

In 2005 Arrow Web treated 3990 patients. By 2010 they had moved to a 20 room hospital and treated 76,643 patients! They added a dental clinic, eye care clinic and pharmacy to their services.

They also began to realize that no one hospital was big enough to assist all the patients in the catchment area. They needed an outreach program that could provide basic health care services by visiting people in their homes.

How We Got Involved:

In 2009 Rebecca Cherono, managing director of the Great Rift Valley Development Association, recommended we donate bicycles to Arrow Web to help support their newly created outreach program. In 2009 we donated 15 bicycles to Arrow Web. It was also the first time I would meet Bram Simiyu, co founder and project coordinator at Arrow Web, a man who continues to impress me with his dedication to this day. Bram a a few friends started Arrow Web, with money from their own pockets, in 2005 and have grown it to a full service hospital in just a few short years.

In 2009 Arrow Web’s outreach workers assisted 9561 people though the delivery of medicine, health education and basic health services to the people in Kibera. In 2010 we donated 15 more bicycles to to the program and Arrow Web’s outreach volunteers increased their reach to assist 24,745 patients in their catchment area!

Though all of the credit for the programs success goes to Bram and his team at Arrow Web, we are very proud to be a part of their success.

How You Can Help:
By raising funds for the Tour d’Afrique Foundation you are helping us support the efforts of organizations like Arrow Web. But of course the hospital needs more than just bikes. If you’d like to contribute to Arrow Web Hospital directly to support the activities of the hospital you can do so by visiting the website listed below.

Paul

Related Links:

Donate to the Tour d’Afrique Foundation:
Help us provide more bikes to Health Workers in Africa, visit our donation page.

Learn More About Arrow Web Hospital:
Arrow Web Website: http://www.arrowkenya.org/index.php