Tomorrow morning I’m heading across the state to my parents’ house for five nights. The process of packing this evening took a grand total of about 30 minutes. That’s not a newsworthy item in itself, but it’s funny considering what a big deal capital-p Packing was throughout my childhood. Before any trip, my mother would hound my brother and me about packing up, getting packed, making sure we packed everything. I doubt she was atypical among mothers in this regard.
When I was really little, I basically fell into thinking that way, imagining that packing was a critical and time-consuming chore. But as I got older, and especially after I started backpacking frequently in my pre- and early teens, I realized how little time it actually took. All you had to do was know what you need, not need much, and focus briefly on cramming it into a bag. My brother and I would rarely even think about packing—no matter how long the trip—until about 8:00 the night before we left. We’d each knock it out in about an hour, and I can’t recall any time our procrastination or haste created any serious problems.
Some people never really learn this. They imagine travel, especially foreign travel, requires complex preparations and checklists. It’s sad, because it frequently limits people in where they go and what they do. I know some older people—my parents spring immediately to mind—who say they really want to travel abroad, but who constantly shy away from it because it seems like such a project just to put the stuff together. It’s easier to simply defer it until later.
The truth is you need almost nothing to travel. After clothes and a handful of hygiene items, what is there? Unless you’re going to the Amazon, Himalaya, or Sahara, the less planning you do is probably the better. Just grab what you would for a weekend trip to a friend’s house two hours away, then multiply that by about three.
You’re never going to do much interesting travel if you’re not low-maintenance. Sometimes the must-pack-everything people actually end up making trips happen, but that can be sadder than when they talk themselves into staying at home. In backpacker ghettos the world over, you often see people carrying not only an enormous overnight backpack stuffed to bursting, but also on their chests an equally stuffed daypack. I call these people sandwich-packers, and I have to think theirs is one of the most miserable plights on Earth.
Hanging out in the living room of a hostel in Sydney, I listened to two Canadian girls chat with some other travelers about how they wanted to spend a few nights in Bondi before leaving the Sydney area. I had seen these girls arrive, and they had brought mountains of stuff. Getting out to Bondi meant either taking a cab (unthinkable with Sydney’s prices) or taking public transportation, which would involve a couple train transfers and a fair amount of walking. “It would be nice to go out there,” one of the girls said, “but, I mean, we can’t take all our shit out there for just a few nights.”
What a tragedy, I thought. They had come to the other side of the planet, and they were going to spend their months-long trip only going to places that had the utmost in convenient travel infrastructure. And they weren’t just being wimps. I wouldn’t have wanted to haul all their shit out to Bondi either. I don’t know how their travels ended up, but I do know that only about a week later I hopped on a plane to Kuala Lumpur and spent four months getting around on motorbike taxis and tin-can provincial buses where you store your luggage between your knees and schoolchildren ride on the roof. I felt justified in having only my tiny little 10 kg bag.
If you travel minimally, you’re probably not going to look or smell very glamorous at any point in your trip. But there’s plenty of time for that when you get back home. You defeat the purpose of travel if you don’t have the freedom to move. Packing carelessly is one of the best things you can do for yourself.
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