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Day 238: The Dirty Mac Brigade

The ‘Andrea’ was originally scheduled to leave last Monday, but TIA, so you can forget about that flight of fancy. Today was whiled away at the little café in Port Mole (only €3 for a gritty coffee with powdered milk – cheap for Libreville) where Alex and I cadged the free wi-fi access that one of the shipping offices around here courteously (but no doubt unintentionally) provides.

Alex, to his eternal shame, is lumbered with a MacinTOSH computer (the clue is in the title), the least portable portable computer in the world. While he was walking up and down the street waving it about trying to get it to pick up a signal, I was happily sitting the an air-conditioned café chatting to my friend Anna on Skype.

Now apart from the obvious draw-backs of owning one of these Early Learning Centre-style “Macs” (ie. You can say bye bye to your video games, porn, Skype and videos that play in the correct aspect ratio… unless you pay extra!) can I be the one to point out that if you’re travelling they are the about as much use as a bag of sugar in your fuel tank – batteries, mon aimée, batteries… they last five minutes and you can’t swap them for fully-charged spares. Rubbish!

I think I’ll stick with my Lego Technic thank you very much, even if Duplo bricks are the ‘industry standard’. With my spare batteries, I can get 9 hours of juice out of this little fella (Dell Latitude X1, can’t say enough good things about it), connect to the internet in the most unexpected of places and even edit my videos (which I assure you will return one day). It’s been bashed around on my adventures, but it’s still going strong. Not bad considering I bought it off eBay for a goat and a couple of magic beans. Hee hee.

Graham Hughes

Graham Hughes is a British adventurer, presenter, filmmaker and author. He is the only person to have travelled to every country in the world without flying. From 2014 to 2017 he lived off-grid on a private island that he won in a game show, before returning to the UK to campaign for a better future for the generations to come.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. junctions

    “my videos (which I assure you will return one day)”… I know I’m late into the blog, but I’m reading it like a book, and boy do you have me turning pages (even though I came here to read the whole thing after I had all the spoilers, and even read the “interesting” ones, i.e. filed under Somalia, Jail, last page and seen the TED talk).

    Anyways, Cape Verde was simply devastating (hehe, I know I couldn’t even endure what YOU had to go through without going so nuts I would have made some dung balls with the material left by the drunkard), but you have THAT much power in your writing. I had to skip over every rant after the first one and almost stopped reading when I saw on the YouTube channel that no more weekly videos were made after #25. I specially loved this about this “book”, seeing the movie after reading each “chapter”.

    So, are you planning on uploading more videos?
    Take into account that some of your spectators are not in the U.K. (or U.S.) so the NatGeo videos are off-limits.

    In any case, thanks for the great adventure!, you rock.

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