Packing Tips

Packing can be a nightmare. What should you bring? How much of it? It differs for everyone and there is no right or wrong, in the end. But here are some tips I have:

You don't really need that many sets of clothes. Laundry service is easy to find just about everywhere and in most places it is cheap. People understand when they see you in the same clothes every once in awhile. Especially shorts/pants, they don't get dirty too quickly provided your in the majority of the population that wears underware. And speaking of, be sure not to skimp on underware and socks, and thankfully they are among the smallest pieces of clothing.

Bring extra camera batteries. Nothing sucks more than getting to Angkor Wat only to realize that your camera is dead.

Bring a way to back up your photos. Losing photos is gut-wrenching but luckily there are tons of ways to back them up. You can use your laptop, burn the photos to DVDs along the way, upload all of them to the web, or, my recommendation: bring large enough camera memory cards for your entire trip and back them up with USB drives. So if you bring 16GB of memory for your camera, bring 16GB of USB sticks. This is convinient to do even on the road and ensures you have two copies of everything in case of any sort of mishap. Laptops are often too heavy, DVD burning is a service that is often hard to find and sometime rather expensive, and uploading pictures to the web is painstaking on slow connections.

Bring a waterproof bag. Obviously, it depends largely on where you are going and what you are doing, but in situations were you might be swimming, hiking, kayaking, boating, out in the rain, etc., having a waterproof bag is such a lifesaver for your wallet and electronics. You could also just get a waterproof camera, but sometimes these cameras suffer in photo quality a little too much for me to consider them.