Story 2SZE Packing for two years, off the grid in the Himalayas...

Packing for two years, off the grid in the Himalayas...

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in ask on (#2SZE)
story imageWith a budget of just $1,200, and room for one carry-on and two check-in suitcases, both of no more than 60 kg (132 lbs), total, how would you prepare for living completely off-the-grid for two years in a remote village in the Himalayas?

That's the question asked by the Shortwave Listening Post, based on a user request, obviously with an intended focus on radio equipment and accessories. The necessities like food, shelter and warm clothing apparently being taken care of for you. Radio certainly would seem like the way to go for inexpensive entertainment and information in very remote areas, but answers that instead include satellite internet services (that stay within the budget with 2-years of service) could be equally interesting, if they are in fact available and practical.

http://swling.com/blog/2014/09/virtual-radio-challenge-ii-two-years-off-grid-in-the-himalayas/
Reply 7 comments

Been there (Score: 2)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-27 20:18 (#2SZG)

Great article, great question - thanks for posting, Evil V. Also, I didn't know about SWLing, so thanks for linking to it.

I had to ask myself that very question when I joined a volunteer service that sent me to the wilds of rural Central America back in '98 (ie, sort of before the Internet was a thing). I brought a couple of toys to keep entertained - binoculars, bird books, guitar, some writing projects - plus a walkman, a dozen very carefully chosen cassettes, and a shortwave. To this day I like shortwave, but was starting to come to grips with the fact it's a largely dead medium. Even with a decent antenna these days I struggle to get much of anything better than evangelical preachers, China, some Arabic, and megahertz after megahertz of static. It's a wasteland out there even by the standards of 1998.

Went the other route then and got myself one of these this year. I love it, there's tons of stuff to listen to, and the reception is flawless until my wifi connection cuts out. That doesn't answer the question these guys are asking though.

Got to say I'd still bring the binocs, bird books, guitar, and a (reluctantly) a shortwave. I'd probably also bring a netbook and external harddrive, and hook myself up with a POP3 account and maybe an instance of leafnode running on the netbook, so I could sync mail and news. You're going back to the age of sporadic connections and doing most of your work offline, then uploading it. That said, the GSM revolution has made a lot of places phenomenally accessible all of a sudden, and I wouldn't be surprised if Nepal and the like have benefitted from it. I wrote this piece about my surprise at being able to connect to the internet from a remote location in the Sahel, and this piece called Life in 56K about how easy it is to live on low bandwidth.

As for these radio buffs obsessed with longevity, I'd simply use the money to buy a radio and two spares, a solar charger for double A batteries, and enough flannel to make them two or three little protective baggies. With the remaining money I'd purchase a two year supply of scotch, a couple cases of cigars, and enough weed to live well. Actually, sounds marginally better than my current lifestyle. I kind of feel when you're headed out to rural Bhutan, the question isn't how to maintain your current tech needs, it's how to adapt to a tech-free lifestyle. Bring a sack of books, some pens and notebooks for writing, aforementioned scotch, some star maps, and an open mind. Would be nice to not be glaring at the glowing, square screen for a while. Read some Peter Matthiessen to get into the spirit of zen-living.

Re: Been there (Score: 2)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-28 04:51 (#2SZR)

a solar charger for double A batteries
The devil is in the details... Most solar battery chargers have 0.5W panels which, up north, will take a week to charge 4 AAs. For hiking, there are nice big folding panels you strap to your pack, but they're vastly more expensive than bulk rooftop PV panels... eg. $70 for 14W panel, battery charger. Where as you can just as easily get a bare 30W panel for the same price.
With the remaining money I'd purchase a two year supply of scotch, a couple cases of cigars, and enough weed to live well.
If you're following your own advice of living zen, you'd instead bring seeds for all of the above, and grow and process them yourself....
I kind of feel when you're headed out to rural Bhutan, the question isn't how to maintain your current tech needs, it's how to adapt to a tech-free lifestyle.
Don't underestimate the value of BRINGING technology, showing it around, and leaving it to the locals when you go. Something trivial to us, like an eReader just loaded up with several gigabytes of eBooks, would be like a lifetime supply of content in a self-contained library, to a remote community. A few eBooks on modern farming methods could greatly improve their lives. Throw in plenty of tech, like solar water/home heating, electrical motor and propeller design, and they might be able to build their own infrastructure over time.

Just a staticy feed of a few minutes of news every week can be a tremendous tool for them, keeping them up on events in the world around them, and perhaps being a life-saver in the event of natural or man-made disaster.

It's a shame that data broadcasting on shortwave isn't a big thing... Just imagine being in the middle of nowhere, and every day the SD card in your $50 shortwave radio just accumulates several more articles from Wikipedia, and even a few pictures, with no effort on your part. Maybe a Project Gutenberg book every week or so. And more. And that's just the "free" stuff I can quickly think of. I'm sure the many NGOs would be happy to come up with tons of original educational content for broadcasters send out to to entire continents full of isolated people, along side whatever audio programs.

You can kinda-sorta do that with ham packet radio, but that's far more time consuming and involved, and doesn't scale at all, where broadcasting data would work incredibly well.
Read some Peter Matthiessen to get into the spirit of zen-living.
I think I'd rather have several back-issues of Mother Earth News mag, the original "off-the-grid" publication, telling me how to raise livestock, how to build well-insulated houses with hay bails, how to dig a well, etc., etc. Might be very useful to a remote village.

Re: Been there (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-28 13:12 (#2SZX)

I wonder if all those remote people really want modern technology or irrelevant news impinging on their presumably happy (or why else would this person want to move there) existence?

Re: Been there (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-30 01:09 (#2T0K)

I wonder if all those remote people really want modern technology or irrelevant news impinging on their presumably happy (or why else would this person want to move there) existence?
He's going there for 2 years to teach... not because he wants to live there. Someone said it sounds like a Peace Corps mission.

I don't think you can find any peoples except the Amish who shun modern technology when they have access to it... and even they buy generators, power tools, and pay for modern medical treatment. The rest of the world lacks technology because they are impoverished. The incredible uptake of cellphones across Africa is a great model for getting the best of modern technology to the poorest corners of the world where it can dramatically improve lives.

A couple of good books (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-29 09:25 (#2T09)

A few good books. Meaty ones to chew on for a long time like the bible, baghavad gita, collected works of aristotle. Maybe some seeds.

Power (Score: 1)

by zocalo@pipedot.org on 2014-09-29 12:04 (#2T0D)

I see a few suggestions for solar, and this is good; you are at high altitude so the increased efficiency might offset some of the days where the weather is bad, but I can't help but feel that suitably efficient panels are bulky, fragile and expensive. I've not idea if this will work in your specific region, but it might be worth considering other forms of natural energy, specifically wind and water, as a power source. You ought to be able to construct a windmill and/or watermill using locally sourced materials - wood, mostly - so all you would need to take would be some power sockets, wire and a small motor/transformer to generate the power. A quick Google turns up a bunch of links, but this one should give you an idea of what might be possible, and it's also the kind of project that could get the locals involved and take on a life of its own over the course of the stay.

Re: Power (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-30 01:35 (#2T0M)

it might be worth considering other forms of natural energy, specifically wind and water, as a power source.
Looking at Google Maps, Laya, Bhutan definitely doesn't have a river nearby. There seems to be a wash some distance away, but it must not flow very regularly. Being up in the freezing mountains might have something to do with that. Even if it did flow regularly, it would be a huge project for one person to undertake, building their own power house to get usable amounts of power out of it, and running power lines for miles to where they need it... In a more general sense, you can't depend on having flowing water wherever you end up.

Wind, similarly, isn't consistently available. Even if you're in a windy area, you may have to unpredictably deal with many weeks with no appreciable wind, with no notice. Plus I checked prices on small wind turbines, and they're little or no cheaper than PV panels per the capacity, very bulky in their own right, and similarly will require taking large and heavy segments of steel poles with you for mounting. And like water power, designing and constructing one locally would be a big project for an individual, would not allow you to hit the ground running and have power right away like PV solar panels, etc.

And that's the BEST CASE. Worst case, you'll find yourself in an area where there is zero wind, except for the occasional storms, year-round, no available location to install it, complaints from neighbors about the noise, and lots of dead birds around it.

That said, it can be a vastly cheaper way to go. You can pickup a refurbished alternator for $43:

* http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Built-7127103-Premium-Domestic-Alternator/dp/B000EZW5QS/

Given enough input energy in whatever form, that should output 50 amps steady, while 700 watts of solar panels would cost $1,000, would be far too large to pack, and would honestly only provide maybe 1/4 the rated power due to low light levels, and low duty cycle due to no power at night. That's the way I'd go if I wanted to build electrical infrastructure for an entire village, but certainly not for my own modest energy needs while traveling. And given a lack of flowing water sources, and insufficient wind, you might need to hand-crank the thing for all your energy needs, which would be quite a feat. At that point, you'd be better off with something designed for such use:

* http://www.amazon.com/Generator-Emergency-Portable-Lightweight-Polycarbonate/dp/B00EZS8VQS