A L S O__T O D A Y Internet Access Sites in India   T A B L E_T A L K Hitting the slopes? Discuss snowboarding and other winter sports in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y This week in travel Wanderlust's select guide to the top travel-related news stories from around the globe (12/04/98) In the driver's seat By Dawn MacKeen The smart alternative to renting, driveaways let you take someone else's car cross-country -- for free (12/03/98) At home in Tuscany By Ferenc Máté The slow-paced pleasures of rural Italy come to life for two new residents (12/02/98) The belles of St. Mary's By Jennifer Moses A Jewish writer learns about the Old South, and herself, in the most unlikely of places (12/01/98) Afoot in the South African bush By Lance Gould A New Yorker ventures on a walking safari into the wild world of wildebeest, Cape buffalo and dung beetles (11/30/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		--------D E S P E R A T E L Y  S E E K I N G  E - M A I L ------ ------------------------------------Finding Internet access in India is ------------------------------feasible,but not for the fainthearted. BY LISA DREIER | Ten years ago, I stood in a dusty telegraph office in the high-altitude Bolivian city of La Paz. A man with mahogany skin and a llama-wool vest handed me a yellowed form where I was to write my message, one letter in each box. I was traveling on a rock-bottom budget and telegraphs were expensive: something like a dollar a word. But I had promised my parents that I'd let them know, at the very least, what country I was in -- and I had just crossed the border from Peru. So I gripped a pockmarked pencil and scrawled the bare minimum of words to convey my message: "Lisa -- fine -- Bolivia." Even then, things were changing fast. By the time I reached Tierra del Fuego, I was starting to find fax machines -- amazing contraptions that could instantly transfer a cramped, one-page letter from the Straits of Magellan to my parents' living room. And then, a few years later, I discovered e-mail. It didn't take me long to fall under the spell of this new medium: It was fast, easy and totally addictive. Working in an e-mail-crazed California workplace, I checked mine every 15 minutes. I e-mailed people more often than I spoke to them. At one point, I realized I was in closer touch with my friend in the Amazon than with my friends across town. I was never home, I was swamped at work, but you could always reach me on e-mail. By the time I left for a seven-month journey through Asia last January, I couldn't imagine living without it. There was one major problem: I was going to India. Deep into India -- traveling through scrubby desert and remote villages, sputtering across rivers in ailing motorboats, dodging cows in the alleyways of 800-year-old forts. Nevertheless, I was determined to find e-mail along the way. In India's mind-boggling clamor of life and death and color, I would seek out both ancient mysteries and modern-day Internet access. This, at least, was the idea. In the months before my departure, I began to ask around: Was it possible to send e-mail from India? I planned to do a lot of writing on my journey; would I be crazy to bring a laptop? Seasoned travelers reacted in horror to the whole idea. In India, they said, telephone jacks were nonexistent, the phone lines were configured wrong, the Internet was banned by the government, electricity was erratic and ungrounded and, in any case, my laptop would surely be stolen. A few weeks before my departure, a writer friend told me she had taken a laptop to India the year before -- with disastrous results. Accessing the Internet had proved impossible. Plugging her laptop into the wall had caused a small electrical fire in her ashram. Finally, she abandoned the cursed thing at a friend's house in Bombay and continued her journey with a lighter step. Considerably chastened, I lowered my hopes but hung on to a stubborn belief in the miraculous. It was, after all, a question of e-mail. And so I stepped off a plane in Delhi as a member of a strange species -- a budget traveler with a laptop. I had never attempted third-world travel with such an expensive piece of hardware before, and it took some getting used to. First, traveling with a computer knocked me into the pack-rat category. The lightest laptop I could find -- the slim and hardy HP Omnibook 800CT -- was about the size and weight of a small picture book about India. But try adding the required paraphernalia -- a padded case, external floppy drive and diskettes, extra battery and charger and an array of adapters, cords and surge protectors. Suddenly, a third of my luggage was dedicated to the computer. I wedged most of this into a beat-up, generously sized day pack. From a distance, I looked like an overzealous student. But a careful observer -- say, an experienced thief -- would have noticed that I was curiously protective of the dusty old bag. Security became more of an issue. I kept the laptop out of sight at all times, and rarely told anyone -- even fellow travelers -- what lay inside. When checking out hotel rooms, I'd look for an electrical outlet and sturdy locks on the doors. The view from the window and softness of the bed were secondary. It often seemed that the computer, like an overbearing travel companion, was calling the shots more often than I was. By cobbling together a series of plugs, adapters and surge protectors, I discovered that I could tap in to the local electrical current. But I'd been warned that this could be a recipe for disaster -- one developing-country electrical event, and my computer would be transformed into a sea of melted plastic and fried data. So whenever possible I used battery power, charging up the spare only when I was in the room to put out any fires that might result. Problems with the phone lines, however, proved insurmountable. On my first day in India, I got down on my knees and crawled under the bed in my mid-range hotel room, following a knotted phone cord that simply disappeared into a hole in the wall. So much for phone jacks and modems. I was going to have to find public Internet access. E-mail? The Internet? Nobody in my hotel had heard of it. But the five-star listings in my guidebook yielded more luck. The Hotel Imperial, one of Delhi's finest, told me I could access the Internet through the lone computer and modem in its Business Center. I put on a skirt, grabbed my address book and tried to look nonchalant as I walked through the gleaming marble entrance past liveried doormen. Mr. Jain, the Business Center manager, bowed and greeted me in a lilting voice. I asked him, almost breathlessly, if he had Internet access. "Ah yes," he said, sitting down in his three-piece suit and peering solemnly at the computer screen. With a dignified, almost ceremonial air, he dialed in over a modem that required more than 10 tries to connect, entered a special password and series of codes and then: oh joy. I was connected. It was expensive in local terms, but I didn't care. I told Mr. Jain about my travel plans and asked him whether I could find Internet access in the state of Rajasthan -- or anywhere outside Delhi. He shook his head gravely. I turned back to the computer and typed out a message to my friends, family and editors warning them that I didn't know when, if ever, I'd be online again. N E X T+P A G E | The rickshaw driver and Rajasthan Online - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTO BY LISA DREIER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.