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: Kettlestacks

by Tynan on

A little under a year ago I decided to get serious about working out and keeping my body in peak shape. After a ton of research (the kind that finds all these cool things that I write about every week), I decided that Crossfit was the best possible choice.

Not only is it great for strength, endurance, dexterity, power, and a number of other metrics, but it’s also efficient. That means that instead of spending an hour in the gym I can spend just 20-40 minutes and still get huge results.

This is acheived by combining huge compound movements which work out several muscles at once with old fashioned weights.

The favorite tool in the Crossfitter’s arsenal is the formidable kettlebell.

The kettlebell, in its original form looks like an iron cannonball with an oversized handle on the top. It was overwhelmingly popular until the dumbbell took over by virtue of being adjustable. With cheap weight plates available to adjust the weight of a dumbbell up and down, the kettlebell found it’s way to obscurity in the main stream.

Still, serious weightlifters and trainers continued to use the kettlebell. Despite not being adjustable, the kettlebell was favored for the wider range of exercises it could support. For example, the handle can be gripped with two hands and be swung from between the legs to shoulder height.

This exercise, appropriately called a “swing”, works the back, quads, and glutes. There’s no equivalent with a dumbbell, other than awkwardly trying to replicate the movement with a dumbbell (I’ve tried it).

One of very few compromises in my lifestyle which had to be made when I decided to go totally nomadic was my workout routine. Gyms are easy enough to find everywhere, but kettlebells are usually nowhere to be seen.

To the rescue comes a company called Kettlestack, which makes the first fully adjustable kettlebell. When I found out that they use standard dumbbell weight plates that can be found in gyms and stores around the world, I was excited.

A few weeks later a package was delivered to our apartment in Tokyo containing two Kettlestacks. At first I was a bit skeptical. All kettlebells I’d ever used were made of heavy solid metal. These were a hard plastic handle and a thin steel frame, coupled with a heavy duty axle to hold the weights.

The instructions are deceptively complicated. Once you understand how they work, loading and unloading the kettlestacks is a trivial procedure barely worth mentioning.

I loaded up 35 pounds, about half the capacity of the lightest model, and started doing snatches with it. I was blown away – the handle felt at least as good as any other kettlebell I’d used, and the overall experience was exactly like using a regular kettlebell. I anticipated weights clinking around and shifting, but there was none of that. All of the plates moved as if they were fused together.

But could it handle heavy weights? I loaded up all the weight I could and did a few swings. The result? I got winded and the Kettlestack showed no signs of stress.

I’m an ultralight packer, which makes the kettlestacks perfect for me. They take up almost no room in my pack and I just buy new weights everywhere I go or bring them to a gym and use them there.

Here’s a video of me packing my 28L pack with everything I own, including the Kettlestacks.

And here’s a picture of me doing some overhead swings on the lawn of Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan last week

Besides being perfect for traveling, these are ideal for the home gym or even a regular gym rat who wants a more effective workout. Get yours at www.kettlestack.com/kettlebells.

Gadling Gear: Aloksak Plastic Bags

by Tynan on

Wait… don’t skip this article. I know on the surface it looks like an article about zip lock bags, but soon you’ll realize that it’s a lot more.

It’s a story about love, lust, and the beautiful simplicity of good design.

We were in Panama, taking a motorized dugout canoe to the tiny island of Isla Robinson. Our first warning sign should have been when the pilot of the canoe handed us a tablecloth.

The entire thirty minute boat ride was spent with us frantically trying to use the tablecloth to parry the spray’s advances towards our cameras. The video camera didn’t make it – now it stays zoomed all the way in all the time.

“We’ve got to get waterproof.”

And so, when we returned to civilization, we scoured the internet for a good waterproofing solution. It had to be reliable, lightweight, ultra-packable, and preferably cheap because we now had plans to waterproof everything in our bags.

We discovered Aloksak. These bags appear, look, and feel very similar to regular zip lock bags, but they’re actually quite different. In fact, they’re certified waterproof by none other than the US Navy.

A large order was placed and we waited for our friend to bring them to us in Japan when she visited.

True to the advertisement they really are totally waterproof, lightweight, and easy to pack. But besides waterproofing, they have a lot of other uses. And as you know, multi-function items are key to efficient packing.

Believe it or not, they actually take up negative room in your backpack. Why? Because you can pack your clothes in them, squeeze the air out, and then seal them into nice little vacuum packed packages. To see how effective this is, check out this video of me packing everything I own into a tiny 28L backpack.

Even if you use them for nothing else, they’re worth their modest cost for this one use. There’s also a 1 quart TSA sized one for your liquids. If you’ve ever had your shampoo explode in your bag, you know why you want a high quality bag to hold them.

The bags will also, in a pinch, make a halfway decent pillow. I’ve slept on trains, in a cave, on the roof of a building, and in a mountain hut, using the halfway (actually more like 1/3) inflated bag as a pillow. For an added bonus, wrap it in a fleece, jacket, or heavy shirt to make it a bit more comfy.

They come in a variety of sizes. I personally went with the multi pack (a 12×12, 6×9, and two smaller ones that are good for cell phones, wallets, and ipods), and an additonal three pack of 12x12s The 12x12s are perfect for clothes packing as well as impromptu pillow creation.

You can get them at Amazon

Gadling Gear: Burton’s Sleeper Hoodie v2.0

by Grant Martin on

One of my favorite ways to pass time on my regular 6AM flights out of New York City is by boarding early, cashing out and sleeping until touchdown in Detroit. I’ve even got a favorite hoodie for the occasion, this brown zipup I bought in Sweden that I can stuff my hands into, pull up the hood and promptly start snoring in. What a waste of a first class seat.

Looks like the folks at Burton smell what I’m cooking and have designed a sweatshirt specifically for this task. We covered last year’s model with all of it’s nifty features, including a built-in inflatable pillow, ear plug and passport pockets and light shield over the hood. This year, they’ve also integrated a travel toothbrush into the mix. It looks like the total package for anyone wanting to integrate comfort and efficiency into one piece of drool-friendly apparel.

Good lucking finding one of these gems on the white market though. Burton and all of their distributors have sold out completely and they’re going on Ebay for upwards of 200$.

Meantime you can check out specs and some images of the hoodie directly from Burton.com.

Get your Ski-Mojo working!

by Abha Malpani on


No, it’s not what you are thinking. Ski-Mojo is gear that will help you ski longer should you not be able to keep that squat while skiing for an extended period of time.

The little mechanism that is strapped to your backside and rods down to your knees and somehow connects into your boots, has been in development for the last 11 years and finally hit the stores last week for a whopping £289 — but then skiing has always been an expensive sport.

Apparently it reduces fatigue and enhances your control and balance on the slopes. I suppose the mojo lets you rest on it in some way; but will you still build the muscle? or will you have to forgo the tight-butt and thigh muscle cuts?

Although I wouldn’t buy it (I’d feel really old), it’s available for skiers of all standards. Want it or not, the website (“this is no hoodoo”) is funny and worth looking at for a giggle.

[Via Guardian]