It’s one thing to head off on a pilgrimage with a sturdy staff, a horsehair cloak and a leather bag containing one’s meagre possessions. It’s quite another to do this pilgrimage with all the necessary electronics to stay in touch. And the snag is that all the electrical stuff needs power and lots of it. The commensurate problem is that I’ve read a lot about the perils of charging up phones and cameras in hostels; gadgets do get taken sometimes by mistake, sometimes through malice.
Advice on the forums tends to come from either the horsehair brigade along the lines of, “phone? why would you want a phone? If anyone needs to contact you in an emergency they can always write a letter to Senor XXXXX at Hostal YYYYY who will be happy to pass it on. If they can find you” or the fatalist brigade, “if you were meant to have your phone stolen, then that’s just the way the world is meant to be. Learn from it and grow stronger”.
Being neither a horsehair shirt wearer or a Calvinist, I decided I needed a way of recharging at least the phone. So I’ve looked into solar chargers and external batteries. There’s an amazing choice on Amazon. Also pretty amazing as all the products seem flawed. The ultra-lightweight solar charger (with Bear Gryll’s moniker attached) caught my eye. Only 3.5 ounces! I had visions of this thing tied to my rucksack charging up during the long Spanish days. The reviews however indicate that you need the charger facing directly into the sun, preferably in Sahara-type conditions for a 40 hour day to get a decent charge. Not very likely in May with the Earth spinning around with its sadly predictable 24 hour day. Other solar chargers tended to look more like satellite dishes.
So I’ve gone for an external battery. The idea is that you charge up the battery overnight from the mains and it can then supply power to your phone multiple times. And a 20-quid battery is unlikely to get nicked. Again there is a bewildering range of sizes and compatibility. I had decided on one only to spot in one review that it took about 40 hours to charge the battery. So in a kind of pleasing symmetry to the solar charger, one needed a 40 hour night to make the thing work well. But I found one that seems to hit the spot – about the right combination of weight, capacity, time to charge, output amperages etc. I just wish that I’d not had a last minute look at the reviews after checkout. A final review of, “cheap cr*p, complete waste of money” didn’t make me feel that my 60 minutes of searching for power had been well spent.
Perhaps the Calvinist approach has something going for it.
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