Sim Cards

A real revelation to us was paying for an in country sim card. On reflection this was hands down the best decision we made and one we will continue to employ for the rest of our trip where possible. We struggled so much in Chile to get around that we decided to invested in a sim card with mobile data for Thailand as we were there for a month and thought it couldn’t hurt. As it turned out, it was completely invaluable for getting taxis, reading blog posts about the best places to go and sending the occasional picture home, which is always nice. It meant that where hostel wifi was poor we could still plan our days and keep in touch and it was great to have the security of Thai phone number which we could give to hostels when booking. A number of times we were running late for our suggested check in time and we had hostels email us to make sure we were still coming – it would have been impossible to confirm this and stop our room being given away if it hadn’t been for the internet access.

For the sake of £5-£10 (actually under in some cases – we paid about £3 for 3 gigabytes of data in Myanmar) you can have the ability to hail a cab and call home stress free. Another pro is when you see a sign completely in another language or you’re not sure where you are, you can look it up on the internet and understand what you are seeing. It’s like having a guidebook in your pocket without having to carry an often out of date tome. We also found that blog posts from other travel blogs are actually often better than guidebooks – they are more recent and have the space to include details like exactly which bus to take and how much it will cost, saving time and confusion, especially if there is a language barrier.