Getting out of a tight spot in South Africa: Kieran Alger reports

When my South African friend called me back in January to reveal he'd landed us World Cup tickets, I could picture the electric atmosphere, watching great games under floodlights in huge stadiums as the world's finest players battled for the ultimate prize. I could envisage the carnival of a competition like the World Cup taking a new continent by storm. At no point did I expect that I'd be holed up in a VW Polo saloon, in the pitch dark, somewhere on the outskirts of Mtatha, in the middle of the Transkei - the first of four territories to be declared independent during the Apartheid era. I hadn't bargained on being in a place white South Africans advise you strongly not to be driving in the dark. In the dark. Lost.

At no point had I mentally prepared for driving down a pothole-peppered road, having passed a 'Road closed' sign about 10km back. I'd also not realised that my South African friend behind the wheel, who'd driven us so expertly and confidently into this wilderness from Durban, like a man who knew his end destination, was actually relying on me have brought the printed address of our hotel with me. Needless to say his carefully compiled itinerary was sitting snugly on my laptop, 6,000 miles away in West London.

Luckily as the editor of a gadget website, my trip to the World Cup was never just going to be about football. To help convince the boss to give me 2.5 weeks off, I'd decided to make the most of my travels and come loaded with travel tech to test en route. In my kit bag: One MiFi portable hotspot, a CoPilot South Africa sat nav app loaded onto my HTC Hero phone, an iPad loaded with apps including Scrabble and LogMeIn, some mini speakers and a million cables and chargers.

As the fear factor rose and the panic started to set in, I put the tech to the ultimate test. Fired up the WiFi, switched on the iPad and set about using LogMeIn to retrieve that vital address and contact number from my laptop at home. After five more bumpy minutes I was in possession of our end destination, slapped it into the satnav on my phone, used the MiFi to run the app over WiFi and confirmed we were heading in the right direction. The isolation of Coffee Bay was just another 70km of moon buggying in car made for suburbia away and the big question now occupying us was would we make it in time to see Spain v Chile?

Bio:
Kieran Alger has been indulging his passion for tech by editing T3.com for over two years. He also has over ten years experience in building websites and digital media. Before joining T3.com, Kieran headed up the digital team for men's magazine, ZOO, and prior to that he spent 6 years at AOL UK.