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What’s in a traveler’s backpack when they take off to go on an adventure? Aside from essentials like a wallet, clothes and water, they probably carry around a guide book with maps and tips on how to get around.

But in an age when technology is just literally at one’s fingertips, lugging a doorstop guide book around is the last thing that a traveler wants to do.

Enter Travelfish.org, a popular blog about traveling in Southeast Asia, which recently released their first iPhone application available for $9.99 on iTunes. Dubbed Angkor, the app is a comprehensive travel guide covering 49 attractions that include integrated maps of Siem Reap and Cambodia.

According to Samantha Brown, managing director at Travelfish, the company set out to give iPhone and iPod Touch users access to information on the popular tourist destination without expensive roaming charges from downloading maps and tourist information using a mobile provider.

“We have 30 more apps covering destinations across Southeast Asia in the pipeline for 2010,” Brown said.

“Next up is a small island in Thailand and Vietnam’s Hanoi, which should both be available in the iTunes store in February.”

Brown, along with her blog-founding partner Stuart McDonald, came up with the idea for an all-encompassing iPhone app — easily downloaded before the trip and requiring no Internet connection — after they played around with the iPhone owned by McDonald’s father when he visited them in Bali last year.

Brown said roaming charges for using the iPhone totaled more than $4,000 while McDonald’s father was in Indonesia over the course of two weeks.

“So we decided to package the maps and all our information into a design specifically for the iPhone,” she said.

What sets Travelfish apart from the usual travel blog is that its information is compiled by paid researchers and is completely free of often-unreliable and easily manipulated Wikipedia and crowd-sourced content.

“Although anyone can come and look at Travelfish.org and see our content there, the iPhone creates a whole new opportunity for getting our content to travelers,” Brown said.

The application, which includes 200 photos, packs a wealth of information about Cambodia in one easy, compact format. There are eight main menus— Background, Sleep, Eat & Meet, See & Do, Transport, Walking Tours, Photos and Maps — in the Angkor app, and a table of contents that makes browsing easy.

“We started with Angkor because of all the places we cover in Southeast Asia on Travelfish.org, it’s a place that pretty much everyone who visits Cambodia visits,” Brown said.

She added that by using the app, users are able to access information about planning the trip, even if they are already on the road.

The Background menu is a storehouse of information about the history of Cambodia, a brief description about the culture and its people, religion, language, food and drink, media and the environment. With a few slides of your finger, you get to access climate details, safety issues, even notes about bargaining and shopping.

In the Sleep menu, Angkor let’s you choose your accommodation based on what part of the country you are in. All you have to do is touch one of the pinned dots on the map. They all represent hotels and motels in Siem Riep and the renowned ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat in western Cambodia.

The pinned dot will pull up a small box with the accommodation’s name. Touch the small triangle icon and the application will jump to the next window and display a profile of the venue, the price range, phone number, e-mail and Web site address, map and a personal review.

Other than Siem Reap, the Sleep menu also has information about hotels and inns along Airport road and other areas, including Wat Bo, the French quarter, the old market and on toward Angkor Wat.

Similar to the Sleep menu, the Eat & Meet offers everything you need to know about Cambodia’s cafes and bakeries.

The See & Do menu covers popular tourist destinations, such as Angkor Wat, a celebrated Unesco World Heritage sites, and other must-see spots like Angkor Thom, Roulos Group and Banteay Srei.

The menu also offers a list of activities like elephant rides, seeing Angkor from the air, cooking classes, yoga, shopping, motorcycle tours and horseback rides to give you plenty to do on your visit.

As for getting around, the application offers a Transport category that covers how to get cheap flights in and out of Cambodia, how to set up tours and precious explanations about border crossings to Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.

The Walking Tour section provides detailed maps of Siam Reap and Angkor park. Travelfish offers two traditional routes in Angkor, the Le Petit and Le Grand Circuits.

It also offers Le Travelfish Circuit, an alternative route to seeing the temples, which comes in handy when you need a map and have no Internet connection.

The Photo gallery contains a beautiful collage of high-quality photos that come with captions.

Although the application is very sleek and easy to use, Brown and McDonald said the process behind its creation was not easy.

They worked with Bytesizecreations, an iPhone developer in South Africa. They suffered from the slow loading time and rolling blackouts since Bali and South Africa lack decent electric and Internet infrastructure.

“To get the very final version of the app to us before we were able to submit it to Apple, our developers had to cycle up a hill to find a strong enough Internet connection to be able to upload it to us after their ISP was struck by lightning,” McDonald said.

However, the amazing end result may make all the troubles worth it.

Unfortunately, there are no future plans of creating the same app for Indonesia as a destination at the moment. The same goes for an app for the BlackBerry. Brown said this was because they are aiming for the global market even if the blog’s founders are based in Bali.