The great international railway adventurist Paul Theroux once wrote, “Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.” You know the feeling—the midnight wandering through foreign streets to find your hostel, the pantomiming it takes just to buy a loaf of bread without getting swindled.

But now, with the iPhone, a library of travel-friendly apps can ease the strife for any world traveler–that is, as long as they have one of AT&T's international data packages, which start around $24.99 per month. Without a plan like this, a three-minute YouTube video could cost you about $40 in roaming charges, according to the AT&T Web site. Luckily, many European cities offer free WiFi, so don't forget to pack your iPod Touch.

For planning

The first you should consider is Lonely Planet Travel Guides (99 cents), which lets you purchase digital versions of Lonely Planet guidebooks on some 35 cities around the world. The initial download costs 99 cents and comes with a free San Francisco guide. Additional guides for other cities cost $14.99 each. These e-guides offer everything the print guides do like festival information, restaurant recommendations and city history. Besides a nifty map function that plots your location, the e-guides download right to your iPhone or iPod Touch and require no Internet access.  

To better understand any new culture, The World Fact Book ’09 (99 cents) provides a detailed breakdown of 250 countries including geography and population demographics. (I particularly like its section on flag identification and history.) Those who want a lay of the land before exploring a new city have nothing to lose with the free Google Earth travel app, which offers bird's-eye zooming and addresses for restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions.

Plan on jumping from country to country? Plug your flight number into FlightTrack Pro ($9.99) and get status updates on multiple flights at once with estimated delay times and gate information. Or try iRail European Rail Timetables ($2.99) to track train schedules around Europe, though departure and arrival times are not in real time and will not show delays. Once you arrive, turn to the Currency Calculator (99 cents), which unlike other currency converters also works as a calculator, letting you quickly figure out what little money you have left without changing screens. 

For communicating

For everyday interactions, Lonely Planet offers a series of Lonely Planet Phrasebook apps in 14 different languages including Mandarin, Italian and Turkish, but they are pricey at $9.99 each. With more than 600 phrases in each language, they also include audio and phonetic guides for pronunciation help—great for finding the bathroom, though it won’t help you write a poem for your Belgian fling. 

Better, form your own sentences using one of 10 different Ultralingua Dictionaries, which range from $19.99 to $24.99 each and come with a conjugation function for tricky verbs.  Other translation apps like QTranslator ($1.99) offer instant access to offline phrase translation in more than 40 languages, which you can save for quick referencing. Or consider the similar Mobile Translator ($4.99), which comes with an iChat-like interface—though Internet connection is required.

Still, no man is an island (even if you’re on an island) and for years Skype has been the go-to option for cheap long-distance communicating. That hasn’t changed with the iPhone’s free Skype app, which lets you talk and text free with other Skype users from anywhere in the world.

Better yet, just send your own postcard using SodaSnap Postcards (free). It lets you take pictures, add text and send personalized e-mails to help fuel the envy of all those saps you left behind.