29 May 2015

35 litres of stuff

Several times other travelers asked me where the rest of my stuff is. Many are surprised to find out that I only carry one medium-sized backpack.

The advantages of traveling light have been analyzed in excrutiating detail on a great number of travel sites and forums. Let me save you the time and present the key principle of traveling light: Things are heavy and you don’t need most of them.

Most backpackers look like they are moving house for a year. I blame two faulty lines of thought:

(1) If you travel for longer, you need more everything.

(2) Foreign countries do not have shops, ever.

So these hobo-hoarders go out and get themselves a nice 90-litre hiking pack. What goes well with that? Oh yeah, a second, smaller pack they can carry on their chest! That’s useful because it allows them to strap their sleeping bags on there, too.

On the one hand, it must be nice to have everything you could possibly need with you. On the other hand, I don’t want to go beep!-beep!-beep! while awkwardly reversing off a train because all that gear is too bulky for me to turn around. I have carried heavy equipment for extended periods, and I’m not a fan. The prospect of doing that for an entire year is incredibly off-putting to me.

So I decided against it. After all, I was going to stay in civilization (or whatever passes for it) for most of the time. I knew I would be able to buy additional things as needed. This also meant that I would leave typical hiking-gear, like a hiking boots, tent and sleeping bag.

(I understand that travelers of the female persuasion tend to carry more stuff. The social consensus seems to be that the whole smelly-but-somehow-handsome-in-a-rugged-way look is male-only. Lucky me!)

I would just bring the basics then. When I inspected my gear before leaving Samsun, I took this picture:

So, let’s see:

• One pair of shorts, one pair of jeans
• Travel towel and travel blanket
• Swimming trunks
• First-aid kit
• Laptop and charger
• Powerbank (thank you, Alex and Clément!)
• Notebook (thank you, Sisi, Sofia and Martin!)
• Sunglasses (the label says “Ray Bon”)
• Flashlight
• Windbreaker
• Sweatshirt (wool)
• Sunscreen
• 4 T-shirts
• Belt
• 4 pairs of woolen socks (two pairs hand-knitted by my mom!)
• Washbag
• 4 Boxers
• Assorted cables and adapters
• Vacuum compression bags (Eagle Creek)
• Backpack (Assault pack II)

Plus, of course, the clothes I was wearing.

The vacuum bags are incredibly useful: They are heavy-duty ziplock-bags with one-way valves on the lower end. You stick your clothes in there and then roll the bag to press out all the air. This way, my clothes shrink to less than half their volume. In addition, the bags keep them dry and protect them from that typical bag-smell. I’m absolutely amazed by these bags and I could kick myself for not getting them earlier. This compactness obviously doesn’t do anything about the weight, so my backpack is a bit heavier then it looks.

All my clothes put into those two vacuum bags

And here is all that stuff packed up nicy and tidy:

So that’s it: A moving household stuffed into a 35-litre backpack! If I’m completely honest, even this bag could stand to lose a few items. I might still eliminate one or two t-shirts and the pair of jeans and replace the swimming trunks with a less bulky pair.

Until next time,
Arne