Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, right? If there is one area where making things easier is appreciated, it is travel. This is how I used technology to prepare for my long weekend in Tokyo.

First, a caveat. I quickly realized that Tokyo is idiosyncratic in having practically no free or easily accessible Wi-Fi coverage whatsoever.  I knew I would have access to Wi-Fi at my hotel, but could otherwise not count on being connected. Additionally, I was traveling light, so no laptop. I only brought my Kindle and iPhone. Again, as Japan uses a different cell phone standard from South Korea, I could not use my iPhone as a phone – it was essentially an iPod Touch for this weekend.

Google Maps

As I would be largely offline, I did something as lo-tech as print some maps and routes from Google Maps.

I had made a map especially for the trip, with possible locations to visit highlighted. If you have not done this before, this is how:

1. Search for desired locations in Google Maps.
2. Locations are marked with a red marker on the map, and if you click on the marker, you get a pop-up box with more information about the location.
3. As long as you are logged in with your Google Account you can select “Save to map” in this information box, and save the location to your own custom-made map.
4. Rinse and repeat.
   Here is mine:

View Tore in Tokyo 2011 in a larger map

From this map, you can print relevant area maps, or make routes from one place to another and print that.

Street View

Additionally, to ensure that I could find my way from the Meguro subway station to the Princess Garden Hotel, I used that wonderful addition to Google Maps called Street View.

Starting from the subway station, I could use the panoramic views offered by this service to basically take a “virtual tour” of my hotel neighborhood and preview what the walk from the station to the hotel would look like once I got there in person!

Metro

Speaking of the subway: I have some experience with subway systems in various European cities (like Oslo, Paris, and London), plus of course Seoul, where I live now. The Tokyo subway system is a bit more complex than I am used to, as it consists of several competing lines and not all subway maps (which tend to be in Japanese only anyway) show all lines.

To make sense of it all, I used a free iPhone app called Metro. This is in fact a very old app I used for many years on my old PalmPilot and my successive Palm OS PDAs, but it is now also available on the App Store. It has subway maps for pretty much every city out there, and once you have the maps installed (I have Oslo, Seoul, and Tokyo) you can easily search for subway stations and calculate routes between them. The app gives you the option of searching for the fastest route, as well as for the route with the fewest line changes. It also shows the entire route so you can keep track of where you are at all times.

Travelocity / Tinderizer / Amazon Kindle

I never really understood the need to spend a lot of money on travel guides, and so never bought any for any of my travels. This time around, I decided to make my own personalized Tokyo Travel guide:

1. I visited the Tokyo page of crowdsourced travel wiki Wikitravel.
2. Using the Firefox extension Tinderizer, I could go to various pages on Wikitravel that I found useful, and with just one click on my bookmarks bar (“Send to my Kindle!”) send those pages by email to my Kindle.
   In the process, the service strips out unnecessary formatting to make the documents more usable on the Kindle.
3. On my Kindle, I created a new collection called “Tokyo” and put all the documents that Tinderizer had emailed to my Kindle in it. Presto!

Any additional advice on using technology and gadgets to help with travel? Let me know in the comments.