Online Travel: Where mouse is on the menu

Remember poste restante, that handy post office service where mail was kept for passing visitors? There was the rising tide of expectation as you approached a town where you'd asked friends and family to write to you. Then there was the wait until the post office opened, the shuffling through piles of letters, many of them clearly long past their collect-by dates, the disappointment when letters didn't turn up, the thrill when something totally unexpected did await you. Plus there were the people you met in the queues or chatted with as you sat outside on the GPO steps and read those long awaited missives. Poste restantes were a combination of communication nerve centres and travellers' pick-up joints.

Remember poste restante, that handy post office service where mail was kept for passing visitors? There was the rising tide of expectation as you approached a town where you'd asked friends and family to write to you. Then there was the wait until the post office opened, the shuffling through piles of letters, many of them clearly long past their collect-by dates, the disappointment when letters didn't turn up, the thrill when something totally unexpected did await you. Plus there were the people you met in the queues or chatted with as you sat outside on the GPO steps and read those long awaited missives. Poste restantes were a combination of communication nerve centres and travellers' pick-up joints.

Now, they're gone. Replaced by their bland 21st- century equivalent, the internet café. Nobody writes letters anymore, they send e-mails. Why bother with something that takes ages to get there and often doesn't even get picked up, because travel plans change and the mail-drop city gets bypassed?

Yet, in their own way, internet cafés - quite apart from being a whole lot quicker, more reliable and more convenient than poste restante ever was - also have their romance. They've clearly become pick-up places themselves. How many internet café romances have been sparked by technical advice proffered from the adjacent terminal user?

Internet cafés also do far more than poste restantes ever accomplished. Quite apart from letting mum know you're still fine, or fixing to meet your friends 500 miles down the track, there are all those familiar travelling internet tasks from booking beds to researching nightclubs, checking flight schedules to organising rent-a-cars. At the next terminal someone will be downloading some music, probably illegally, while on another terminal digital camera images are being sent home or burned on to a CD.

Although there's nothing café-like about many of them, some can indeed turn out a good cappuccino and because places with lots of computers tend to attract computer nerds, you can often get good technical advice, perhaps sort out that niggling problem with your laptop. "Multi-tasking" is what computers are all about, so it's hardly a surprise that some internet cafés do that as well. I first encountered an internet café-cum-laundromat in San Francisco nearly 10 years ago: wash your clothes while waiting for files to download.

I seem to spend a lot of time in internet cafés, which is surprising considering I actively try to avoid them. I'd much prefer to hook up my own laptop in a hotel room, download any e-mails to deal with at my leisure or send messages that I've already got ready to go. Unfortunately some hotels simply don't have the appropriate connections or there's no internet service provider in the country concerned or they simply charge through the roof. Paying £15 to £20 for 24 hours broadband or wi-fi connection is one thing; when you only want to hook up for 10 minutes it's entirely another.

A recent trip starting in Singapore and ending in Shanghai took me through a typical range of internet possibilities. Because I was doing a daily blog of my all-at-surface-level trip (see http://lonelyplanet.mytripjournal.com/tony_wheeler_singapore_to_shanghai) I had plenty of opportunity to explore them. The Gallery Hotel in Singapore - a stylish ultra-modern boutique hotel on the riverside for just £37 a night - had free broadband connections for my laptop.

I couldn't even get a dial up connection in my Kuala Lumpur hotel and the internet café I found nearby was cheap but painfully slow. In Penang, the delightful Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, a beautifully restored old Chinese mansion, may have been age-old in style but electronically it was right up to the minute with free wi-fi connections and my enormous room was only £35.

In Bangkok, I eventually abandoned my hotel's hopeless connections for one of the internet cafés interspersed with the topless bars around the nearby Patpong Road. For the rest of the way through Cambodia, Vietnam and China my communications were almost all via internet cafés. There were plenty of them, they were dirt cheap and the connections were often lightning fast. In one café in Danang, Vietnam they also sorted out my train booking and sent somebody on a motorcycle to the station to collect the ticket before I'd gone offline.

China had the most interesting internet cafés I've ever encountered, although they were hard to encounter. Sometimes I was able to recognise the Chinese characters which announce "internet café" but more often some friendly local would point out where to go. Which usually meant down some dingy back alley or up flights of equally ominous looking dark stairs. Then there'd be an anonymous door or some grungy curtain to push aside and suddenly - kaboom! - you were in a huge and brightly lit room with row upon row of computers stretching away into the cigarette smoke-hazed distance. The sight of a visiting gwailo (aka a white foreign devil) never raised more than a frisson of interest from the young clientele and although every café I ventured into seemed to be packed shoulder to shoulder, there was always a spare terminal.

Fortunately the keyboards in Chinese internet centres presented no problem because in some countries they certainly do. Internet cafés in the French-speaking world dispense with the familiar QWERTY keyboard for the unfamiliar AZERTY and then make a few other changes so you end up typing curious messages becquse so,e of the keys qre in the zrong plqce. In a Tunisian café recently I laboriously scoured the keyboard, searching for that vital @ key until a neighbour pointed out you had to press alt ctrl and 0. There was no indication of this hidden symbol on the keyboard.

These days you can find an internet café almost anywhere, but you can't always expect the staff to have any technical expertise. In a hotel in Oman none of the hotel business centre staff could get the computer to connect, but the girl singer from the Filipino rock band playing in the bar wandered in and reconfigured it in minutes. Moments such as these might lead you to believe that the demise of poste restantes is not such a loss after all.