Plugged in: Here I come Pakistan

CNN correspondent, Kaj Larsen is traveling to Pakistan and will be blogging about his experience. Catch all his stories here and on CNN's American Morning.

I began packing for Pakistan the night before my flight. For some people packing for a journey is an exercise in organization, utilizing applications like packing pro and making lists. For me, its more like a foray into fortune telling. Where do I think Ill be in 48 hours, what will I be filming, is it going to be monsooning, am I sleeping on the ground or in at the Intercontinental?

Compounding the confusion is that covering 3rd world disasters is an organic process. On some stories the itinerary is straightforward, you show up, you go to the hotel, you go to an interview. In Pakistan it’s the opposite. Nearly 20% of the country is underwater. Millions of IDPs (internally displaced persons) are without food, shelter, or water. Until you actually get on the ground, its hard to know exactly where you are going or how you are going to get there. Where are the hardest hit areas, where are the most refugees, and does the security situation allow you to get there to tell the stories of those affected. Its an exercise in controlled improvisation, or to paraphrase former Secretary of Defense Rumsfield, there are a lot of “known unknowns and a few unknown unknowns.”

As a bulwark to uncertainty the modern journalist has a variety of tools in the toolkit to stay connected and beam ideas back to the world. The flow of real time information makes it absolutely necessary to be transmitting from the field to home base. Whether that means using a satellite truck in Arizona or a BGAN in Pakistan the tyranny of geography has been transcended by the miracle of wi-fi, sat-shots, sms, cell towers, and a host of other communications technology. But like all progress it comes at a cost (in this case the cost is sometimes literally the cost as satellite time can be prohibitively expensive). In Henry Drummond’s famous speech in Inherit the wind, he says “Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder, and but the clouds will smell of gasoline.” For me the low side of the ability to communicate with almost anyone in the world from anywhere means you are almost never unplugged. Gone are the romantic days of “going slick" into a story, one lone journalist with his pen and his notepad. The packing list for this trip included 2 iridium phones, 2 macbook pros, 1 3G wifi repeater, two adapters, 1 GPS, 1 Suunto watch with GPS and Compass, 2 hard drives, 2 video cameras, 1 GoPro HD Camera, 1 BGAN satellite transmitter, 2 Iphone 4s, 1 Flip camera, 5 SD cards, two power strips, and two digital still cameras. Not to mention the batteries, chargers, and cables to power up, connect, download, upload, and generally keep all the equipment going. When I laid it out end to end, I had enough cord to circle my entire living room, twice!
The one moment of respite from all that connectedness is stepping onto the airplane and for a few brief hours (or in this case 15.5 hours) you can get away from the the instantaneous on-demand information age. I settled into my seat, cords coiled up and packed away below. I looked forward to some overdue reading and maybe even splurging on a movie. As we climbed out through the marine layer the individual tv monitor on my seat diplayed picturesque visions of the Buj in Dubai. But as the screen flicked over to the news update, I was reminded that we are never really unplugged anymore, that the idea of a flying info cocoon was really just a mythology. On the screen in front of me was the latest news update- Triple Suicide Bombing in Lahore- right where we are headed.