There was a cash machine. It was set into the wall of a building near the transport stop, it had a screen, and it had a padlock through the housing. When I pointed at it, the woman I was buying biscuits from made a flat gesture with her hand and went back to what she was doing. Not “it is broken today.” More like “that has not been a thing here for a while.” I had roughly a day and a half of spending money in my pocket and a plan that assumed I would top up here before going further.
I misjudged cash in both directions
The obvious failure is carrying too little, and I did that first. What I did not expect was how quickly the failure compounds. Being short on cash does not just mean you eat less. It means you start declining things: the shared ride, the extra night, the offer to go somewhere with someone. You get quietly more conservative, and the trip narrows without you noticing the moment it happened.
Then I overcorrected. On a later trip I carried a genuinely silly amount, all in one wallet, and spent about ten days being mildly anxious. Not about theft particularly. About the flat stupidity of dropping it, or leaving the wallet in a room, or the bag going somewhere the bag was not supposed to go. Anxiety about money is its own tax on a trip.
Where I have landed: enough for the planned stretch plus about half again, split across three places on my body and in my bag, and none of the three is the pocket I actually pay from. The split is not really an anti theft measure. It is an anti me measure, because the thing that has actually happened to me is losing track of a wallet, not being robbed.
Small notes are the real problem
This is the practical detail I wish somebody had told me flatly, so here it is flatly. In small places, nobody can break a large note. Not because they are suspicious of you, but because a stall that sells tea all morning does not have that kind of float sitting in a tin.
I have watched a man walk to three neighbouring shops trying to make change for me, and I have felt awful every time. It turns a two second purchase into a small community project. Twice I have just told people to keep it, which they visibly disliked, because it made a gift out of a transaction neither of us wanted to be a gift.
So now, in the last town that has a bank or a busy market, I deliberately break everything down. I buy something moderate with a big note specifically to get change. I ask, if I can, for smaller denominations when I withdraw. Arriving somewhere small with only large notes is arriving with money you cannot spend.
Signal arrives in patches, and the patches are social
Connectivity in these places has rarely been a clean line between on and off. It is patchy in a way that is geographic and specific, and everybody local already knows the map of it.
The reliable spot is often somewhere slightly absurd: a particular bench, the top of a rise ten minutes out of town, the corner outside a shop. You can find these by walking around holding your phone up like a divining rod, which is what I did the first time, or you can just watch. If there is a place where three teenagers are standing looking at their phones, that is the place. That is the whole trick.
What surprised me is that this makes connectivity a social event rather than a private one. You end up standing in a small group of people all doing the same thing, which is oddly companionable and also means everyone can see you having your moment of contact with elsewhere.
Telling people at home what silence means
My worst logistical mistake had nothing to do with me. On an early trip I told a friend I would message “when I get there,” went five days without any usable signal, and came back to a person who had been genuinely frightened and was angry with me in a way I had earned.
The fix is not more communication. It is defining silence in advance. Before I go somewhere thin, I tell one person three things: the rough shape of where I am going, the date after which silence would actually be unusual, and what I want them to do at that point. That last part matters. “Worry” is not an instruction. Something like “if you have not heard from me by this date, message this person and then contact the consulate” gives them a job instead of a fear.
I also send a short message whenever I do hit signal, even if there is nothing to say, precisely because it is content free. It is a timestamp, not a conversation, and it means the silence afterward is not ambiguous.
Paper backups I felt silly making
I write things on paper now and I no longer feel embarrassed about it. Contact numbers for the person at home. The address of my own embassy or consulate for the country I am in. The number on the back of my bank card and the bank’s line for reporting a loss. A rough note of where I intend to be, by day.
The reason is simple. Everything I would normally rely on lives inside one object that runs on electricity, and I have had that object at four percent, in a place where the power came on for a few hours in the evening, on a day when I needed a number out of it. Paper does not care.
I also carry a photo of my passport page, printed, in a separate part of the bag from the passport. This has never been needed. It costs nothing and it is the kind of thing where the one time it matters, it really matters.
What being unreachable is actually like
I expected the disconnection to feel purifying. Everyone writes about that. What it mostly felt like, the first few days, was low grade nagging: an itch to check something, then a small drop when I remembered I could not.
After about three days that faded, and what replaced it was not peace exactly. It was a kind of narrowing. My attention shrank to what was actually in front of me, partly because there was nothing else, and I got noticeably better at small practical things. Where the water is. What time the light goes. Who in this place seems to know what is happening.
I do not think this makes anybody a better person. It is just what happens when the number of things you can attend to drops. But it is the closest I have come to the state that people who write about travel keep gesturing at, and it arrived through boredom rather than through anything I would call an insight.