Equipment for traveling
--
I’ve spent a good amount of time in 27 countries, many several times. And what did I get from all that traveling? Product recommendations! Here are the objects that have allowed me to comfortably traipse through our world.
You’ll see from the notes that my style is more “$15 home stay in Mexico City” than “Star-rated hôtel with package tour”; this is how one gets to see 27 countries without having wealthy parents. At this level, you’re doing a lot of walking and there’s no concierge to take your clothes to the laundry or carry your bag, meaning tourism equipment blends together with hiking and camping equipment.
I did a bit of lit review and a lot of #gear blogs feel more about conspicuous consumption than bona fide recommendations. Sir, I respect that you travel with a $300 titanium tea set, but I will continue to fully enjoy tea from my $3 collapsible silicone cup. My friend, it’s cool that you travel with a drone, a high-end Mac, and multiple cameras, but I don’t think I’ll do the same.
Everything here is middle-shelf expensive, but most of it is useful all the time. I’m wearing these shoes to work and wearing these pants whenever the need for pants arises.
The #gear blogs often have a Martin Scorsese-like overhead shot of the items listed. Here’s mine, because omitting the usual junk like band-aids and t-shirts and sunscreen bolsters a fiction that I’m much more organized and a lighter traveler than I actually am.
Nobody paid me to list these things, but if any of you #brands are reading this, it’s never too late for you to throw things my way.
The pants
https://www.prana.com/p/brion-pant/M4BN99312.html
Gentlemen, the ladies already worked it out: black leggings all around the world (but see below). Given societal opinions about men in tights, these pants are the closest you’re going to get. They seem to be of the same material and the same stretchiness. Being a petroleum product (nylon/spandex), they resist water and are sink washable. They dry quickly enough that you can wear them after a few hours of drip-drying; even if they’re a little damp you’ll still be 100% dry within half an hour. [Reminder: don’t forget the length of rope for a clothesline.]
They don’t retain heat, so great in summer; in winter you’ll need actual leggings underneath.
Ladies may have something like this already, given that there are parts of the world where leggings are not pants.
The shoes
These.
The only thing that matters about these shoes is that they have boot treads; ladies, perhaps you can find similarly endowed non-boots. Rain forests of Borneo, Italian Alps, White House complex, scrambling over Mayan ruins, New Zealand glacier country: these shoes. It’s an irrelevance that I’m pointing you to a vegan shoe vendor and not some rugged hiking-themed place that sells SUV-like shoes. [Meaning they could be worn in the Australian outback but everybody just wears them around town (and yes, I’ve worn these in the Australian outback).]
I also put some standard drug store gel-cushion shoe inserts in there, making them a little better for city travel. On a long trip you can leave them in or take them out and your feet will think you’re mixing it up with two different kinds of shoes.
The sunglasses
Ten bucks or less from a nearby convenience mart, because you’re going to lose them.
There was a Twitter thing for a day, “name something that seems racist but isn’t” and a few people mentioned Oakley sunglasses. They’re a favorite among self-proclaimed rednecks who are out of doors most of the time partly because they have full side protection. If your sunglasses cover 80% of your field of vision, well, they’re only 80% effective. There are more than enough options for full-protection wraparound sunglasses that won’t make you look like a racist.
The travel mug
Zojirushi or bust.
Pros: retains heat better than any other object I’ve ever seen. Seal is 100% so go ahead and throw it in your bag.
Cons: retains heat so well that you’ll scald yourself on the coffee you made at 8AM even at 1PM; doesn’t put out enough heat to warm your hands on a cold day.
Zojirushi makes two types, the ones with a lip so you can drink while walking and the ones with a cup on top. I recommend the walking ones, and get a little collapsible cup if you want a fuller tea/coffee drinking experience.
Also, this allows you to use tap water. A lot of money has been spent to convince you that water you didn’t explicitly pay for is undrinkable. In most of the world this is plain false. In places where the tap water really isn’t, a lot of hôtels and home rentals will give you distilled water from a 100-liter jug they get delivered. Fill up the Zoji and go about your business.
I don’t always take one but a UV water purifier is about USD 100 (the price of ~25L of tourist-district bottled water), and is as useful in Mumbai as in the woods. They work.
The bidet
You may prefer to clean Down There using actual water instead of dry pieces of paper. Of course, in most of the populated world this is the norm, so you can expect a bidet to be available. [The border seems to be Turkey: in Turkey’s main airport, both a spray nozzle and dry paper are provided.]
In places where no bidet is provided, make your own. Take a water bottle, of the kind you’re not using because you drink tap water. With a pointy knife, cut two slits in the top in a T shape. Fill it with water at the bathroom sink, give it a squeeze, and now you have a beautiful stream of water for all your water streaming purpose.
Tip: Pop bottles aren’t as good. Water bottles are usually thinner and have easier to cut tops.
The backpack
A wheelie bag is easy at the airport and a pain absolutely everywhere else.
I use a Kelty Redwing backpack, if you want a specific brand recommendation, but it has two key features worth mention here.
It is a 44 Liter backpack. Yes, you can leave the house with smaller, but once you buy some food and a few books and that dress you fell in love with, you’ll be grateful for the extra room. It’s the right size to put up in airplane bins next to those wheelie bags. It’ll hold a lot of groceries. If you’re a camper, you already know how to tie your sleeping bag to the bottom of your pack, so there’s no need for an 80L behemoth.
The second key feature is the hip belt. If you grew up on backpacks with no hip belt, please put that image out of your mind. It’s your hips that should bear the weight, not your shoulders. Even if you’re getting a much smaller backpack (what the hikers call a day pack), a hip belt will still make your day much easier. Some of the smaller packs have padding and some just have waist straps; your call.
Packing cubes
So many people swear by packing cubes, and I agree that the structure definitely helps.
One cube for every room in your mobile house: one for the kitchen equipment and food, one for the bathroom things, one for the living room (books, documents, the keyboard below), definitely the laundry room, maybe the closet. When you arrive at a place, line up the bags and roll the tops back open a little; when you leave, packing consists of shoving them in the backpack.
All the way through, you know where everything is.
One blogger recommends a set for $45, but in the jurisdiction I live in, the ones pictured are five cents per. It helps to collect them in different colors for faster identification. These are also far lighter than the $45 cubes — weight from packing equipment still counts as weight!
The bluetooth keyboard
I’m taking these notes during some down time on a bluetooth keyboard linked to my telephone. Admit it, now and then you put in a little too much time on your telephone, and a keyboard will cut that time in half. There are some that fold up and so fit with your telephone a little better, but this is the one I find to be easier to type on. It is a board with keys on it.
And check out these cute little mini-easels. They’re balsa wood, barely there, and hold your telephone nicely while you’re typing. Keyboard, screen: you’ve got your office right there. I have a jumbo-sized telephone, and don’t travel with a laptop anymore.
The monocular
This is a toy, but I can’t travel without it. There are so many vistas and so many things you want to see close up.
Let’s set aside the name “Jizmo”, and the logo that makes it read like “Jizm”.
This is much better than the one I’d previously had that cast itself as rugged and masculine. It can focus to infinity, and if you crank it back you can closely inspect the flowers. For microscope mode, turn it around and look through the objective lens (i.e., the lens normally closest to the object).
Mono- and bi-noculars are typically described by the size of the objective lens and the magnification. The consensus is that 10x magnification is too much and you’ll get a shaky image no matter how steady-handed you think you are, so 8x is the highest that’s reasonable. This is a 25mm objective lens, which seems to strike a nice balance between brightness and pocketability.
Two decks of playing cards
Everybody on Earth knows these, regardless of the languages spoken or not quite spoken. Check out pagat.com for an unbelievable number of games from around the world. These are mostly traditional trick-taking, melding, or shedding games.
I carry two decks, one of which has a little line by the suits on every card (so at some point I sat down and drew 106 lines with a ballpoint pen, two per card plus jokers). That means you have eight distinct suits if you want, or ignore the markers and you have double the card count in four suits. The added flexibility allows for less traditional games. If you want something with some geometry and friendly thievery to it, try Carbondale (see above diagram). I try to not distribute it, but here at the end of this essay few people will read, I’ll tell you that I keep a list of adaptations of commercial games playable with two standard decks at carbondale.network/std.
The camp stove
What exactly does it mean to travel? The answer is simple: drinking tea in exotic locales.
And it’s not just for camping. Now and then you might find yourself spending a few days in a place where the only options for breakfast, lunch, and dinner are each $30/person. These places are, as far as I’m concerned, food deserts, and you have to pack in something more reasonable. Sometimes you give the local food an honest effort and it just doesn’t work for you (lookin’ at you, Bandar Seri Begawan).
I’ve switched over to alcohol stoves. They’re glorified aluminum cans (some hikers still make them from pop cans), and as such have zero moving parts and weigh nothing. They light up instantly once you point a match or a lighter at them. REI doesn’t sell them, I’m guessing because they’re too cheap and will make the $100 gasoline stoves with higher profit margins look bad. Their one disadvantage is that it can take another five minutes for your half liter of water to come to a boil, but srsly, what’s your rush? And yes, I’ve verified that they work fine at altitude.
Safety: never pour alcohol into an already hot burner, the flame is invisible in daylight so feel around it before touching it, OK you’re done it’s not complicated.
And, of course, they run on alcohol. Land anywhere on the planet, find a place that sells booze, and ask for whatever they call everclear where you are.
The bottle I bought at the Italian supermarket was labelled “Aquabuena” and how can you not love that name. In the USA everclear has a bad reputation as what you use to spike the kool ade at frat parties, but if you split it 50/50 with water it’s vodka, which is often advertised as sophisticated. If you want vanilla vodka, put vanilla beans in everclear, then dilute 50/50.
You’re using something that cleans instead of pollutes, can sterilize your scrapes and cuts, and can spike your orange juice. And the purity of using something made from wheat and water to cook pasta made from wheat and water is unparalleled.
In the USA, if alcohol can be imbibed there’s a sin tax, but at the hardware store, you can get everclear with added poison (“denatured alcohol”) as paint thinner, sometimes even labelled “fuel”. It burns fine, the food will be edible, but you have to stay upwind because the poison smells terrible.
You’ll need a windscreen/pot holder. Here’s the one I use, though there are lots of others.
So, there are my unsolicited recommendations. I’d love to hear yours.
