Alistair Williams who runs Around the World Travel blog (www.alistairwilliams.com/aroundtheworldtravel) shares his hard-earned travel advice with Cheapflights’ readers.
After travelling around the world for a year-and-a-half you tend you get an idea of what you need and what you don’t. We read many different sources on what to take before we left to ensure we were properly prepared, while trying to balance the amount of things we needed to take with us. The savviest travellers carry very little with them and what they do have they roll up and pack tightly to ensure their bag is as small and bottom heavy as possible. This makes life easier. Simple.
Things can easily run away with you though, especially when you are going to a variety of countries and climates. Travelling exposes you to a wide variety of risks and new elements of the world. Most of these elements we are not accustomed to, nor prepared to deal with in our home country. As a result travelling around the world could lead you preparing for the most remote of situations and risks, but the trouble with this is that you could easily fill a bag full of unnecessary precautions.
There are things you need specifically for different environments, but the balance is a fine line between sacrificing something you really need to save room, weight and money with being stuck somewhere saying “if only I brought that after all”. What happens more often than not however is that you start thinking “this will be really handy” and soon have loads of stuff, which weighs you down and reduces your mobilty (crucial when you are travelling). There were times we had to walk 6km in baking heat in Brazil and I am so glad at that point we had a relatively light “optimised” rucksack by then or it would have been miserable.
At the end of the day a balance must be struck between what you need to take and what you should take.
In the following posts are items we packed and what we found was useful and what was not. We now realise that we packed far too much and were over cautious with what we may need. We ditched a lot of things (See the Miss List) and came home far lighter. Other countries, including developing countries such as Laos, will generally have the things you need en route and nine times out of ten this will be far cheaper. Beware of fakes however (especially in suncream in Asia) and try to visit reputable dealers in a shop. Look at the labels to check for spelling errors and faded printing as they are signs of knock-offs.
The only time we were in a situation where we wished we had something, and didn’t, was surgical tape. The kind of sticky fabric you find on material plasters (not the plastic sweaty ones). We wanted this in a roll to stick gauze wound dressing on. This was not in our First Aid kit that we purchased specifically to cater for our ills while travelling. Now this surprised us, but hey, you never know these things until you have experienced them.
So without further ado here is the Hit List and Miss List…
