Sixteen Tips To Pack Super Light

by Tynan on

Welcome back. Last time I talked about how and why to pack light. Today I present to you a list of my best packing tips that I’ve developed while living out of a 28 liter bag for the past seven months going around the globe.

  1. Keep the things you’ll need first or most often near the tops of the bag. If you use the Deuter 28 you have two openings for this.
  2. Leave spare batteries in their chargers.
  3. Use the side water bottle holders to hold more than water bottles. I keep my computer charger bag (which also has a tiny Nokia USB phone charger and tiny universal plug adapter) in one side and my TSA approved bag full of liquids in the other. That way in the airport I can go through the scan quickly and plug in my computer without digging through the bag.
  4. If your bag has two compartments like the Deuter, stuff one of them as full as possible with stuff you don’t use often and leave the other one partially empty to make it easy to find stuff and to fit stuff you get along the way.
  5. Get a Kiva collapsible backpack and clip it to the front of your bag. It’s perfect for carrying around a camera or jacket.
  6. Use every last bit of space. Put everything you want to pack on your bed, and pack big things first. Then look for an appropriately sized little thing to jam into every nook and cranny created by the big thing.
  7. Take a look at your 3-4 biggest space eaters and see if there’s a significantly smaller version that will get the job done. Jackets and sleeping bags are easy candidates (modern good sleeping bags can fit in your water bottle holder if a silk liner isn’t going to be thorough enough for you).
  8. Don’t bring a pillow. Inflate an Aloksak partially and put it inside your fleece instead.
  9. Wear your bulkiest stuff on travel days.
  10. If you have a lot of room left over in your bag, get a smaller bag! Don’t fill yours up just to use it.
  11. Don’t bring a sleeping pad. A Luxury Lite cot is smaller, much more comfortable, and more versatile.
  12. Fold jackets to the width of your bag and then roll them as tightly as possible.
  13. Never bring cotton clothes. They aren’t warm, they dry slowly, they get dirty quickly, and they absorb odor. Wool is the exact opposite, but is still cool enough to run or workout in.
  14. Bring as few clothes as possible. No one will notice or care that you wear the same shirts every few days. That’s not what traveling is about.
  15. If you’re going to poor countries, bring balloons as souveniers to give away to kids. They’re tiny and kids love them.
  16. Don’t lose stuff like I do. Double check for all your stuff before you go.

As a bonus, here’s a video of me packing my bag:

How to Pack Super Light and Have Everything You Need (Part 1)

by Tynan on

I draw suspicion when I pass through customs sometimes.

“Where are your bags?”

“I don’t have any.”

“How long are you staying here?”

“Two months.”

My friend Todd and I travel with just two tiny carry-on backpacks. Twenty eight liters. Not only is that all you need, it’s all you should ever want. I’m going to explain how to pack everything you could possibly need and still have room for souveniers.

In fact, I carry a laptop, a professional camera, a bed, full rain gear and exercise equipment with me. If you don’t need that stuff, you could easily pack even lighter.Why Travel Light?

Have you ever taken a vacation in your own city? You take your significant other and you go stay in a hotel downtown. Somehow, even though you do the same exact stuff you would have done at your house, it’s a lot more fun. It’s relaxing.

Why is that?

I have a theory. I think that possessions bring along worry and stress with them. You have to worry where to keep them, whether they’re clean or not, whether they work or not, whether they have batteries, and where they all are. Have a bunch of stuff? This mental baggage adds up.

Then you go to a hotel that has nothing but a bed and a coffee maker in it and you feel free. None of your stuff is there to bog you down.

The same goes for traveling, except that you also have to carry it all with you. I see these backpackers with 70L bags PLUS another backpack on their chests and I just wonder what in the world they could possibly have in there.

Maybe someday someone will show me.

When you travel light your range increases dramatically. Want to leave your hotel and take a walk through the neighborhood before getting a cab to the airport? No problem. Want to take a crazy train trip through Southeast Asia? Me too, but not with a suitcase or bodybag sized pack.

The nice thing about packing in one small bag is that it makes packing on side trips easy. Take out the stuff you DEFINITELY don’t need, and keep everything else. You don’t have to pick and choose what you transfer from your big bag to your small bag.

Clothes

Don’t do that bundle method. I understand the benefits, but for me a least, it’s just not the best option in real life. If you get the right clothes, like these Icebreaker shirts, your clothes won’t get wrinkled.

The best way to pack clothes is to stack them all up, put them in an Aloksak, and zip it up 90% of the way. Then fold the bag in half and zip it shut after squeezing all the air out. This gets your clothes down to their absolute smallest size, is pretty good with wrinkles and makes them totally waterproof. Your bag can fall overboard and you’ll still have dry clothes.

This also makes it so that you can remove your clothes chunk and get to the stuff underneath without messing things up.

If you buy the right clothes you should easily be able to fit everything into one bag.

Bring one pair of convertible pants. It’s all you need unless you’re on business. I only own one pair of pants now and have worn them every single day for over 200 days in a row. I also have a pair of running shorts which I wear when I wash my pants.

Bring one pair of shoes. If you’re going to beachy areas you can buy a pair of flip flops when you get there for a dollar or two and not have to pack them and get sand all over your bag.

Two pair of underwear is all you need. Girls can take more since their underwear takes up less space. Go for the Ex-Officio brand and wash one pair in the shower every time you take one.

Try to choose a pair of shoes that you don’t need socks for. I’ll show you a pair in a few weeks that you can run and hike in without socks. If you have a favorite pair of shoes that does require socks, pack four pair of the thinnest wool socks you can get by with.

Outerwear

The best protection in terms of benefit to weight is getting a technical shell, rain pants, and a fleece. The fleece will be one of your biggest space hogs but I haven’t found a way around it yet. A good Paclite shell and Paclite pair of rain pants will take up almost negligible space.

As a bonus, you can just wear the shell when it’s slightly cold and windy, but not cold enough to warrant the fleece. You’ll also be covered if there is a rain shower.

A hat is a good idea too. Get a wool one. I use mine to sleep on trains and planes by pulling it down over my eyes. This blocks out the sun and keeps me a few degrees warmer, which you need when you sleep.

Electronics

I travel with a lot of electronics. A laptop, digital rangefinder camera, backup hard drive, and phone. They key with electronics is to minimize the amount of cables you bring.

Your camera charger and laptop will probably use the same wall to brick cable (that figure eight connector thing). Take only one and throw the other away.

Get as many USB chargers as you can. The ZEN media player comes with the best one imaginable which is a standard and is only a few inches long. I also use mine to connect my phone to my laptop and to connect my hard drive.

You can either charge straight from your laptop, or you can get a compact plug in thing that lets you charge USB right off the wall.

If any of your cables are longer than a few inches, try to get a retractable version.

Try to get rid of anything other than your laptop that has a wall wart.

Put all of your cables in as small a bag as possible (I used the one that my underwear came in) to keep them consolidated and tangle free.

Stay tuned for next week to see a video of me packing everything in a tiny bag and for a collection of my best packing tips.

Gadling Gear: Deuter Futura 28 Backpack (Warning: Not for Heavy Packers)

by Tynan on

In the (very near) future I’m going to write a comprehensive article about why and how to pack light, so make sure you’re RSSed up and ready for that in the next week or two.

Consider this the prequel. The most important part of packing light is the bag, and I’m proud to say that I’ve found the ultimate bag for packing light, the Deuter Futura 28.

I found the Deuter Futura 28 by accident. I was at Whole Earth Provisions in Austin, Texas, getting ready for my 10 month trip around the world. I needed a bag.

I looked at the North Face bags, the Osprey bags, the Arcteryx bags, and all of the other usual suspects. None of them stood out.

As I was about to leave I saw a bag tucked away in the far corner. It was pushed back into the rack so that only someone obsessively evaluating every single bag would find it. That’s me.

I had never heard of Deuter, so I assumed they must be some no name budget brand. After just a few minutes of examination, though, I realized just how wrong I was. This was the ultimate bag for the light packer.

What makes the Deuter so unique?

First, and most striking, the Deuter has an “AirComfort” suspension system. In a nutshell this is a lightweight steel spring frame that pushes the bag off of the back and creates an airspace between the wearer and the bag. Sweaty back? Not anymore.

Besides keeping you cool, the AirComfort system also makes the bag more comfortable to wear by creating a bit of a suspension system. It’s not bulky and heavy like a camping backpack, but it serves much of the same function.

An unadvertised benefit that you only discover through real world use is that you can put the bag straps-down in a puddle or wet surface and it won’t seep into the bag and drench everything.

The Deuter has two openings, one at the top and one at the bottom. That means that your days of digging way deep into the bag trying to find something at the bottom are over. There’s also a divider in the middle that, once zipped, separates the bag into two compartments, one on top of the other.

I leave my bag in this configuration most of the time. It makes it easy to use one compartment as a stuff sack for stuff you won’t use often (rain gear, cot, etc), while leaving the other compartment nice and easy to work with.

A rain cover is built into the bottom of the pack in it’s own little pocket, ready to be used as soon as you need it. Unzip and pull it over the bag. There is a tether so that you can’t lose it.

The mesh pockets on the sides are excellent. This is a good example of the thought that was put into this thing. They stretch way far out so that you can put big things in them (a small sleeping bag in one case), but have good elastics and nylon straps to hold in even a very small water bottle.

There is a sleeve for a hydration pouch in the main compartment. I hate those things, but the sleeve is perfect for keeping a 12″ laptop in. The laptop ends up well protected between the stuff you’ve packed and the AirComfort suspension.

All of these features are enough to make the Deuter the perfect bag, but what really pushes it over the edge is the quality, both in design and build.

The bag is tiny by most standards, smaller than the iconic LL Bean or Jansport school backpack, but is so well laid out and so devoid of useless space wasters that I am able to pack for 10 months in it and still have enough room to hold four apples and some nuts for snacks.

The materials are all very durable. I’ve put my bag through a pretty thorough thrashing and it still looks brand new.

The bottom line is that Deuter 28 is the perfect bag for any serious traveler who wants a solid balance between capacity and mobility.

If you really can’t fit everything in there, they make much larger versions as well.

Deuter is a German brand that seems a lot more popular outside the US. It can be bought at some outdoor stores as well as Amazon. A hint if you find it at a local store – if you ask they will give you weighted bean bags to try the bag out with some weight in it.