iPod therefore I travel ... 23% of travellers wouldn't leave home without their mp3 player, according to a survey. Picture: Paul Sakama/AP
In my day it used to be a piece of string and a penknife. Nowadays it's mp3 players and hair-straighteners, writes Ed Ewing..
Travel community site travellersconnected.com has polled its members on what today's travellers simply can't live without. And surprise surprise, the most common answer is a digital music player. A whopping 23% of the 1,100 gap-year and long-term travellers surveyed said they just couldn't travel without it.
In second place, with 14% of the vote was the humble camera. Mobile phones were named as indispensable by 9% of travellers, while "beauty products" - hair wax, make-up or hair-straighteners - were essential for another 8%. Credit cards got 5% of the vote.
"The main concern of many travellers these days appears to be the creature comforts in life," says Alastair Banks, one of the site's founders.
Technology never stops changing the way we travel. A decade ago, a traveller in India would think nothing of spending half a day to change a traveller's cheque, or queue at the poste restante for an eight-week-old letter. Now it's seconds at an ATM, and instant communication by email, mobile phones and Skype.
Not that I'm complaining, although an 18-hour bus journey sitting next to someone plugged into an MP3 player is about as sociable as travelling on the Tube.
"Advances in technology, communications, healthcare, and the expansion of the tourist industry mean people can now travel to the most remote places on earth in total comfort and relative safety," says Banks.
That may well be the case, but just because you can cart your technology around so easily, does it mean you should? Isn't it still the case that with travel, the less you have, the better off you are? Does anyone else still swear by a Swiss Army knife, a needle and thread or a small make-up mirror?
In the rush to pack our iTunes into our rucksacks, are we forgetting to pack our sense of adventure when we travel?
