You definitely won’t be able to get the wifi to show you in Norfolk Island.
What you’ll need to do is go to the council offices (behind where the farmers market is held, next to the information centre, ask them for directions if you get stuck).
They sell a tourist sim for $30 to put in your phone/device. Use that instead of your Australian sim and make sure you turn off wifi and only use mobile data.
It does suck but unfortunately the only option. I’ve spent a lot of time on Norfolk so let me know if you have other questions or need more info!
Edit: I guess if you felt brave/cheeky and you get friendly with any locals on the island, you could ask to borrow their phone just to log on and pull the addresses. The main thing is that you need to use a Norfolk Island sim — tourist or local — rather than wifi.
You can write to @meiadeleite and temporarily change you home country to Norfolk Island, after you have left the island she will manually change it back to your usual country. That’s what she wrote me when I asked about Svalbard (which has only norwegian wifi). Unfortunatly our ship could not dock there that day because of too strong winds
When I visited Norfolk Island I was able to get it to show via connecting to the Wifi - but that doesn’t seem like it happens very commonly. Ours was a wifi hotspot purchased through our accomodation, it was on the expensive side but we needed the wifi for some travel related cancellations that had to be dealt with.
The easiest option otherwise is just to send the postcrossing team a message once you get there and they normally allow you to temporarilly change your address location to Norfolk Island and you just change it back once you’ve pulled the address you need.
Have an amazing time on NI, I wish we were back there! The Bowls club does decent meals and has free wifi if needed as well (for contacting postcrossing).
I’m not sure if this has been discussed before but I have the following issue.
I normally live in Australia but I am currently travelling in New Zealand.
Whenever I try to send a card in travel mode, the system sometimes does not let me do it.
For some reason it thinks that I’m not in New Zealand but still in Australia.
This happens a lot when I’m in roaming mode using my data and occasionally when I’m using certain Wi-Fis’.
I don’t understand why it is happening because when I check my ip it is clear I’m in New Zealand and not in Australia.
To solve this issue I try to go change Wi-Fi, for example go to a different venue.
Why is this happening?
Is there a way around this?
I have no experience of this myself, so this is gleaned from what I’ve read on the forum. There are probably other threads that mention this, but maybe this link helps?
You’ll need to use wifi to get the right IP addres. Using 4g/5g/roaming will give you an IP address from your own county. And Postcrossing uses the IP address to determine in which county you are in.
I had the same issue in the UK with my German sim card but luckily connecting to local wifi fixed the problem for me. At first it didn’t work but as I logged out of Postcrossing and used another browser with the local wifi, it worked just fine.
There are also lots of different companies and services which offer to provide a location for an IP address, and sadly they’re neither consistent nor accurate. I don’t know which service Postcrossing uses, but it’s possible that it’s simply wrong. I live in the UK but some of these companies are convinced my IP address is in the Netherlands, for example. Sadly there’s not a lot you can do to fix this other than switch to a different internet connection.
i had the same problem in the past. was visiting mexico and using my internet box from t-moble. when i tried to use my tablet, it said that i was not in this country. i went down to register desk. they let me use their business center computer and had no problem (login and got addresses, printed them - went back to my room and wrote those postcards). they one of the guys told me not to use the t-moble internet box, but login with their wifi and suggested to use a different browser. this work fine on my tablet for viewing things, but change to my internet box when checking for personal stuff like emails for security. good luck and hope you find a solution to your problem.
After posing this question I keep getting stories where members would have to borrow someone’s computer or they would have to buy a local sim card or getting into some other dodgy hustle for managing to send a card on travel mode.
I, myself yesterday had to leave my hotel in the night and go to a coffee shop a couple of blocks away and use their wifi to get a new post-card ID.
That’s just a pitty that post-crossers have to go to such extreme lengths to prove to the site what should be relatively obvious by a simple ip check or by a GPS sharing or by a simple photo proof.
It’s as if Postcrossing presumes that the members are trying to trick the system into getting foreign card id’s.
Postcrossing does IP checks to ascertain where your location is while using the travel mode… but these are not infallible. For smaller regions that might not have their own IP addresses, we recommend that members get in touch with us in advance, so that we can help. There’s no need to go through any extreme measures.
New Zealand is not one of these regions though, and you should be able to find plenty of places with local internet connections. Note that using your own mobile data might not work, as your provider might route the connection through your own country.
Sorry to hear this. The hotel I stayed in two years ago did connect to a San Marino IP, so I didn’t have any problems with Travel mode. A couple of restaurants where I had lunch or dinner also had a local WiFi connection.
Asking for future reference, for the wonderful, hypothetical day I get to travel somewhere really interested - how far in advance does this need to be? Thanks
