Adventure travel has its downsides. One of them is that out-of-the-way places tend to have slow Internet connections. Usually this isn't a problem. You aren't going to the ends of the Earth to tweet about it, are you? Sometimes, though, we need to keep in touch. While writing my Harar travel series, I've been having serious problems trying to do this broadband blogging job on a dialup connection. Not only is it always slow, but it died completely for a week. Today the Internet came back as mysteriously as it disappeared. Assuming you can get a connection, here are some time-saving tips I've come up with, along with others that fellow Gadlingers suggested to keep me from pulling my hair out at the local Internet café.

1: Compose on Word or Notepad while your email is loading.

2: Don't try to open more than one tab at a time, but while you're reading one you can open another.

3: Turn off "automatically load images." In Firefox you do this by clicking Tools-Options-Content-then unchecking "Load images automatically". In Internet Explorer click on Tools-Internet Options-Advanced-scroll down to Multimedia and uncheck "Show pictures".

4: Some email accounts like Gmail have a Basic HTML option that will make your email load more quickly.

5: If you have your own computer, NoScript is a useful program from cutting out a lot of the high-bandwidth crap that clutters up the Internet.

Filed under: Budget Travel, Internet Tools