|
Kaffiyehs are actually really great for travel too. I've used mine as a handkerchief, scarf, makeshift neck pillow, blindfold, to hold earbuds in while lying down, to wrap food, as a pillowcase and as a laundry bag. If you don't mind looking an idiot you can also use them for their intended purpose as extremely effective sun protection/sweatband. I also brought a cheap, very lightweight luggage chain and a couple of luggage locks. A cheap lock is actually probably better than an indestructible one - the real goal is just to make your bag less attractive to thieves than everyone else's. I go through decoy wallets pretty quickly for the same reason - I catch people trying to pickpocket me all the time, but I never even felt the three who succeeded, and all of them made off with empty pieces of cheap plastic instead of my iPod or camera solely because it should theoretically have had money in it. Speaking of which, the iPod Touch or iPhone is the single best usefulness-to-weight-and-hassle item I have. Electronic stuff: cafeKlysm is a good bundle of security programs you can run from a flash drive (including a portable web browser and a click-keyboard if you need to put in payment information on a computer with keyloggers), and PortableApps.com has versions of all sorts of cool things you can install to a flashdrive (including image editors). duralict fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Nov 18, 2011 |
#
¿
Nov 18, 2011 17:53
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 8, 2024 07:09 |
|
|
Shnicker posted:I like the idea of those expensive and durable socks, but does anyone know if there are socks available that are ankle-high and at least a darker solid color? They all seem close to knee-high and/or have all kinds of wild colors. I've never found completely solid-color ones but REI has socks that look like these in various heights.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2013 01:56
|
|
|
Some budget carriers are cartoonishly strict about the weight limits but I've never even heard of someone measuring the dimensions.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2013 23:43
|
|
|
Everyone still brings their laptop bags or whatever, they just put the second bag inside the first and then get it out again while in the aisle of an airplane everyone's trying to board. It doesn't achieve anything, it's just an asinine way to assess extra fees.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2013 01:17
|
|
|
The science supports them but it's kind of a wasted effort if you're not going into the wilderness. I wouldn't use them on tap water because they're really just sterilization devices. Anything that started out in that water is still in there, it's just dead now. They're not filters or anything. Also they don't do anything about minerals or toxicity so if there's lead pipes you'll still get all the same amount of lead, or whatever. Personally I just stick to bottled water.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2013 21:07
|
|
|
Mr.AARP posted:Edit: Nevermind, we'll only be bringing carry ons now as per the overwhelming advice. Hey, that's my bag! I really love that thing, it's the easiest bag to pack I've ever used and it's amazingly resilient. I hauled it around for 18 continuous months and right now it's on its second trip with me. It's been through about 30 countries, two monsoons, a flood, two deserts, more bus racks and rainstorms than I can count and more than its fair share of being kicked around and it's not even showing signs of wear yet. The shoulder straps are comfortable enough to haul around for a few hours at a time, it's totally nondescript next to all the bright-colored pocket-covered crap everyone else uses and because of the lack of visible outside pockets and bits hanging off of it, once you clip those outside straps shut it looks way smaller than it really is. The best thing about it is that it's just one big rectangular pocket, and all the extra pockets are clearly sewn into places where someone noticed they could create more space with them rather than eating into the box. So it's really easy to fit packing cubes into it perfectly without wasting space, and you wind up with much more compact luggage (I use two of them and it's perfect, there's almost an entire 20L-sized bag worth of spare space afterwards and 90% of my clothes fit in the cubes). I pack somewhere around the middle range by backpacker standards but that Osprey bag winds up always being one of the smallest actual packages in every luggage office it's ever sat in just because it compresses down so well. The one downside is that it's not really the best thing to hike with - I wouldn't take it backpacking, in the camping sense. The hip strap isn't great. I have carried it on my back for 6-7 continuous hours without any major discomfort, I just wouldn't want to do that every day. But for travel backpacking it's perfect, I haven't seen anything easier to handle moving around between planes, trains, buses etc. and it's both much more secure and far easier to pack than most bags. e: oh and the dongles broke off all of the important zippers pretty much immediately but the zippers themselves are totally reliable heavy-duty things. I just tied some string to the zips and haven't had problems since. duralict fucked around with this message at 12:54 on May 23, 2013 |
|
#
¿
May 23, 2013 12:51
|
|
|
I just found a couple of insanely useful apps. Triposo is kind of a digital guidebook but unlike the other Wikitravel-based apps it has built in maps and a neat feature that lets you sort attractions by proximity to you (or your most recent gps checkin). It's also free and lets you download guides individually by the country or city. And Jibbigo is basically Bing Translate plus a speech recognition feature. It doesn't have every language yet but it's really useful and free if you use it online (or you can buy translators individually or by the continent if you want to use it offline, which also makes it run wayyyy faster). duralict fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jun 17, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2013 10:28
|
|
|
Just get boots and outdoor clothes that can pass for business-casual (like the stuff posted earlier in the thread) and you'll be fine. That's already stricter than virtually anyone gets about clothing in the region, where tourists are involved. Definitely don't waste space on dress shoes. The harshest dress code I've ever heard of in Siem Reap was "no singlets and you have to wear shoes." e: and flip-flops counted.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2013 10:31
|
|
|
Laptops really aren't necessary, but they do come in handy if you're going on a long trip because you can handle your photos and stuff a lot easier. It is a good idea to bring something wifi-capable, though - my iPod Touch was the single most useful item I owned for the two years I went backpacking. Whether you need something larger is mostly a question of your own personal habits. I would say I wouldn't recommend an iPad-style thing, though. IMO they're way more conspicuous and fragile than either netbooks or smartphones, and they can't do much that you can't do almost as easily on a Touch. If a handheld isn't going to be enough for you, that's when you consider just bringing an actual laptop.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2013 13:56
|
|
|
cadenza posted:I have another question. Maybe I should just make a "Tell me about traveling around the world for a year" thread or something, but here we are. Can anyone recommend credit or debit cards which do not have additional fees for international payments or withdrawals? I've had a brief look around online but I'm not sure how essential this kind of thing is. Anyone got any experience or advice? If you get a debit card from a bank in the Global ATM Alliance (Bank of America/Barclays/BNP/Deutschebank/many others), you can use it at all the other banks' atms without paying withdrawal fees, and the network covers most of the world except Africa and southern Asia. The fees are really steep if you use it outside the network, though. AFAIK there is no card that doesn't involve some kind of international ATM or currency conversion fee, although some of them hide it by giving you a lovely exchange rate rather than owning up to it and actually calling it a fee. I've heard that Capital One gives the best exchange rates in credit cards, but it's also not accepted nearly as universally as Visa. And generally speaking, debit is a way more reliable method than credit, because virtually everywhere on Earth has atms but significant chunks of the world have no way to charge credit cards. If you bother with credit at all, bring it in addition to a debit card.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2013 20:17
|
|
|
Don't overthink it too much. I held onto my travel gear all the way through my two-year backpacking stint, but every stitch of clothing got replaced at some point before I got to the places you're going, and I never ran into trouble swinging 4 months in Australia/NZ and 8 months in south Asia with whatever I picked up along the way. The travel clothing did last way longer, of course (like 3-12 months instead of weeks), but it's really not stressing over. Most of your clothing comes from India and SE Asia anyway, and it's wayyyy cheaper over there - if you can't find travel clothes you like back home, just wear what you would normally in hot weather and replace it as needed. (Not denim. You don't want to haul around more than one pair of jeans.) Focus more on working out what actual gear will make your life easier. I found good earplugs and a comfortable eye mask, a microfiber towel, a silk sleeping bag liner and an airline blanket all worth their weight in gold.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2013 05:46
|
|
|
do not bring jeans to south asia other than that yes if you're going to get travel clothes, get the kind that are really just ultra durable regular clothes.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2013 00:02
|
|
|
My bag was like 12-13kg and I took dozens of flights with 7kg restrictions, including AirAsia. They only checked the weight one time (Virgin Australia, of all people) and that was just because I got a checkin lady who was clearly having a bad day. As long as your bag doesn't look big and heavy (and you don't draw attention to it by struggling to lift it or something), almost nobody's even going to remember they're supposed to check - if your backpack is smaller than your torso, you're always going to read as "traveling light" to someone used to putting tags on duffel bags all day. Really the only exceptions are Ryanair and Easyjet, and that's because they deal with backpackers way way more often (and because they penalize staff if they fail to weigh all the bags). Generally speaking though if you just smile a lot, act friendly but clueless, and aren't too far over whatever arbitrary limits they set, people will almost always let you get away with that sort of thing even if they catch you. It's pretty much the foundation travel skill.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2014 13:12
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 8, 2024 07:09 |
|
|
facey fred posted:I have the Porter, and I have never had any of these problems with it. I can't imagine how full it would have to be for the side flaps to drop open. I've had mine stuffed before, and the sides held up fine. Same, and mine's also survived around a thousand total travel days in all sorts of conditions at all sorts of levels of overpacked without any signs of wearing out.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2015 14:13
|
|