I love to travel, and in my mind I often ask myself, “Who doesn’t?” There’s just something so fascinating and exciting about discovering new places and seeing new things. When you travel a lot, even if you’ve been to a certain place many times before, you often find that you discover something new with every visit. Of course, I do maintain that there is a difference between a traveler and a tourist – travelers engage and involve themselves in the local culture, but tourists see everything from a distance even if they are right there in the midst of the local culture.

There is no doubt that travelers simply enjoy traveling, but even for seasoned and experienced travelers like me, there are just times when the journey can get a little boring. Sometimes you become so overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, by where you are, what you’re doing, and what you’re experiencing that you simply just want to withdraw yourself from everything. It’s at times like these that you wish you were at home in front your 32″ television watching your favorite movie.

This is where the value of bringing some sort of travel entertainment becomes evident. Watching a movie, playing a video game, listening to some music, or connecting to the internet are all great ways of withdrawing yourself from the journey and immersing yourself in another world altogether.

My personal favorite in travel entertainment is the MP5 Player. They’re small enough to bring anywhere. They hold enough movies to keep you entertained for the most part of a day (if you’ll really be spending that much more time on it than actually travelling). They also play music files. Many of them have built in games. And they read e-books, too. And still others are built with the ability to connect to the internet.

It’s really a total package, and the only thing that’s really keeping it from becoming a phone is the ability to make and answer calls, and send and receive messages. Well, you ask, “Why don’t you just get a good a good phone that can do all that?” Simple! MP5 players are usually much cheaper than a phone with the same abilities it sports. And well, I do own a phone that’s capable of all of these things, but when you’re travelling, you just don’t know what you might come up against.

Truth be told, I don’t really rely on cell phones once I get to wherever I’d planned to go to in the first place for several reasons. First, it just gets in the way – people will call and text while I’m trying to talk to the locals. Second, there’s no way I’m risking my $600 cell phone out on the tightly packed streets of Kolkata – with my MP5 player, I don’t have to worry too much about the cost (I even gave one away while in Thailand).

Of course, even tourists would benefit from a good MP5 player. It might just be me, but in-flight movies never seem to appeal to me. Of course, I can easily find other things to do, but not every tourist has the skill set of a traveler.

The best MP5 players are made in China where they were also first developed. If you’re a traveler you can always drop by China and get one for yourself at a wholesale electronics store there, but if you’re the everyday, run-of-the-mill tourist (now wanting to turn traveler?) then you’d best get them from a respectable China wholesale website.