Are you sick of Irish newspaper supplements and magazine inserts telling you about technology? Count yourself lucky. Get over to Australia, where you wade through the inserts to try and find the hard news. (East Timor, Essendon for the AFL Grand Final and Ireland losing to Macedonia.) After 23 hours on Thai Airlines I emerged blinking and absolutely the worse for wear in Melbourne. The first thing the taxi driver did was to proudly point out his e-toll device, automatically paying the tolls imposed on drivers on Melbourne's new highways. (Imagine that on the Naas dual carriageway.) Mobiles, laptops and PDAs were everywhere: everyone seemed clued in to technology, and taking it admirably for granted. Australians, like Americans, have no time limit for local calls, so they can spend as long as they like online without incurring vast charges. (How to get Ireland wired quicker, step one.)
Web access in Australia is ridiculously easy to find. Everywhere there are backpackers there are at least fairly basic facilities to send and receive email. Overall, the going rate is five Australian dollars (£2.50) for a half-hour, on a 56K dial-up connection. A couple of places charged $7 for 30 minutes, but offered cable modem speeds, which proved better value as pages loaded notably quicker.
The staff in these places were very friendly and helpful, if not technically brilliant. The AppleCentre in Byron Bay ("hippy pit stop" said my personalised guide to Australia, spot-on as usual), wouldn't take money because I knew the answer to a fairly basic customer's question that they didn't.
The plan was to drive from Sydney up the east coast as far as Cape Tribulation, with lots of stops along the way. Among the stops, Townsville had fast access, a load of top-spec PCs and free coffee, but simply wasn't a place you'd want to write home about. The touristy bits of towns such as Cairns, Airlie Beach, Noosa and Port Douglas all had three or four places offering web access, all at the same price.
Off the tourist trail, however, you're in trouble. Residents of non-touristy towns like Marlborough, Bundaberg and the excellent Mackay didn't have a clue what I was talking about: more often than not, I was given a beer and told to "stop messing about with that techo witchcraft, mate." Which was fair enough, really.
Email was what everyone was there for, rather than the Web. The exception was the guy next to me in Byron Bay who looked like he had just returned from a decade alone in the bush (the Australian word for anything that isn't surf or concrete). Worryingly, his main interest on the Web seemed to be looking for information on constructing homemade bombs.
Most places were equipped with a basic scanner so that people could send photos home, making friends writhe in envy. After all, the whole point of sending email while on holidays is to rub in how much fun you're having. Think of it as a postcard, only easier.
For backpackers, away for a year or more, it gets a little more involved. Girls sent epic reassuring emails home to frantic boyfriends. Relationships were formed: deals struck: accommodation arranged. Since my own trip was only four weeks long and arranged in advance, I confined myself to gruesome stories of hair colouring, tattoos and marriage proposals to shocked relatives.
The flight home was no easier than the one out. It really is a long, long way from there to here. But as the communications revolution continues, it's getting closer all the time; mother and sister exchange recipes for pesto; taunts fly over Ireland-Australia sporting contests; routine social interaction is easier and cheaper than ever.
The world really is getting smaller. Just how much smaller is clear when you've been to the other side of it and back.
Ted Felton can be contacted at: nolonger@ireland.com