An apple a day

Charlie is currently on sabbatical in South America. Over the next few months she’ll be blogging about her travel adventures in the age of digital.

I'm finding it hard to talk to my roommate at this remote island yoga retreat because the sound of the ocean is so loud. It's ok though, we can Skype.

Back in April I did a TripAdvisor search about the hotel I'm staying in and was surprised to learn it had no electricity. My admittedly out-of-date Mexico guidebook says this whole island is electricity-free and the thought of it, of actually unplugging everything and going darker than a renegade Jack Bauer, was exciting. After all, if I'm getting up at 5:30am to go 'Om' in a dark room for six hours a day, why not go the whole hog and switch off the laptop?

Boy, have things changed since April. There's electricity all right, and we're gobbling it up. Before the plates had been cleared from our welcome dinner, everyone around the table had taken out a laptop (and every single laptop was an Apple).

Today I saw two lovely white-whiskered old folk (husband and wife) tip-tapping away on an aluminium MacBook Pro. The oldest lady on my course is packing an iPad, an iPhone and a PowerBook.

"We have two yoga retreats here a year," says the hotel owner, Lucas, "but I've never seen this before." He casts his hand around the beautiful open-air dining room that he's gone to the trouble of decorating with delicate paper lampshades and fairy lights. Not that we need them - we're all lit up by the blue-white of our backlights. We look like we're working in the world's poshest call centre.

Over guilty giggles everyone comes out with his or her excuses. One woman has a toddler back home and uses Skype to talk to him throughout the day, so he's not missing out on mummy-time. A few of us need to be online to work, otherwise we couldn't afford to be here at all. All of us are able to let our loved ones know we arrived safely, and can be contacted in case anything urgent crops up. And I found out Prince William finally put a ring on it.

This morning I caught our guru checking into Facebook. It seems you can give up caffeine, sugar, alcohol, sleep and sex, but not the internet.