Tag Archives: Travel

International Data – iPad & iPhone

Given that AT&T international data rates $uck, I thought I would provide this quick guide to data set-up for traveling internationally to either England or South Africa. All of these are for pay as you go data.

England

iPhone – Jailbreak required or Wi-Fi Only via Internet sharing on PC or iPad. Did not attempt to jailbreak, just used Skype.
iPad – 3G Card from vending machine, 10 GBP (pounds) for 1Gig. I simply trimmed the SIM card to a MicroSim size, popped it in, waited about 30 minutes, and I was using 3G in the UK. Some Sims are not this size, look at your iPad MicroSim and verify the SIM you are buying will work.
Mac Book Pro / PC – Did not attempt, but if you have a GSM 3G modem you should be able to put in a SIM (same as iPad) and it should work just fine.

South Africa

(Take your passport & drivers license) to a Vodacom Shop at any mall.

iPhone – Jailbreak required or Wi-Fi Only via Internet sharing on PC or iPad. Did not attempt to jailbreak, just used Skype.
iPad – Go to a Vodacom shop purchase a MicroSim (100 Rand), and then ask them for My Gig 1.2 (290 Rand) and ask them to load it on the SIM. Wait a few hours, change your APN to “internet” with username and passwords blank. Turn on-off your iPad, and you should be good to go.
Mac Book Pro / PC – I purchased a GSM 3G modem from Vodacom a few years ago. Just get a new SIM from Pick-N-Pay (1 Rand) and take it to Vodacom have them load up a MyGig 1.2 and wait a bit. The newer modems will have the software installed, but an older one you will need to download from the Vodacom website.

Good Luck!

Our Trip To London (In December)

We did not think that London would be so dark, but given it’s latitude I should have expected only around 8 hours of daylight per day. This made getting over the jet-lag very tough for us, especially Lilu. She was up most of the nights until 3, until the last night she went to bed at 1AM, and she slept like a baby on the plane.

We managed to see a few sights: The Museum of Natural History, The British Museum, and The Bus Tour around London. There were cops everywhere downtown because of the student protest, so we just stayed on the bus and saw a number of things from the bus.

Heathrow and prepping for our trip to South Africa was the worst part of our trip. SAA (South African Airlines) has a 20kg weight limit per passenger we had to trash and entire suitcase and equivalent in cloths. Baggage overage would have cost 750 GBP ($1200), the cost to ship was going to be around 400 GBP ($650) so we decided to just get rid of all the cheap heavy stuff. This was most of my cloths and things like shampoo, shaving cream, etc. We had no idea that this would be the case. Every single US Airline has a 2 bag policy or you pay a slight fee for a 2nd bag.

The flight was nice, but no Entertainment on SAA 221 from London to Cape Town. They were flying leased Airbus 340-200′s and while the flight was smooth, there was little to keep us busy for the 12 hour flight.

Delta Duty Free at 2AM

We traveled to London from Columbus for an overnight flight. All was fine until around 2AM EST when the Duty Free cart came by.

Aside from the loud cart, the noise of yelling “duty free”, it was the hovering around our seats for 20-30 minutes that was really annoying…

I was the first to awake, then Emily woke up, then after 10 minutes of noise they woke sleeping Lilu. At this point I took the picture.

Thanks Delta for turning what could have been a nice flight to a bad one.

To make matters worse, the lead attendant, and Indian fellow, not sure of his name, DL10, stopped to ask if everything was OK. I said no your attendants just stood here yakking about Duty-Free for 20 minutes and woke my sleeping baby, he said that’s what they were suppose to do, then he walked off…