My Time as a Human

This is another very simple but extremely useful system, especially when keeping all of your things in bags or a backpack. In my case, after lasik I still sometimes get very dry eyes in the morning. I have to fumble around in the dark, or in a bag, and somehow manage to find a bottle and pour whatever’s in it into my eye. It would generally be better for my happiness and the sleep of those around me if it wasn’t a bottle of shampoo or glue. The cool hack is to wrap the bottle in tape, and put a predetermined set of folds into the tape. You can easily grab bottles and, by feeling for the folds, know by count if it’s a bottle of shaving oil or the lifesaving drops.

Everyone used to feel like a brilliant explorer or inventor before the web was devised as a way of crushing our egos. The Buddha is giggling somewhere in a cold server room full of humming, whirring bubble popping machines. There is a new way to innovate now: first, hatch a brilliant and unprecedented new plan or invention. Then, go find the best price and options on one of a thousand different versions of what you thought was your cool new design. I don’t even bother writing software anymore. I imagine what I want and then I go find a copy on a thirteen year old kid’s website and mod it.

So my amazing and daring new scheme for ultralight travel has apparently been kicked around for a while already.

The Extreme

These are the people who are playing like I am: lets see how hardcore we can be.

Neverending Voyage
Some dude named Eslevy
Karol Gajda Ridiculously Extraordinary
One Bag Manifesto
As We Travel They’d be lightweight without the heavy camera gear
Wilderness version (There has been a lot of work on wilderness ultralight travel, this is just one riff on it)

The Moderate

These are sites dedicated to sane, normal humans who might need to look respectable at some point in their travels.

Wiki How 1 Bag Travel
One Bag

We’re All One Big Brain!

But as I pointed out in my encouragement to blog, every contribution to the pool of experiences gives us all more options and data. The first few people who refuse to use shampoo are freaks, but after you can find hundreds of people telling their stories, it seems more realistic and the collective data points draw out a real path for less extreme humans. The kinks get worked out collectively and we all win!

The New System

I’m keeping this in mind as I develop the next version of my ultralight backpacking system. I’m trying to find light new ways to handle more cold, as I’m hoping to make it up to Korea on this next round and the winters in the southern Chinese city of Fuzhou were in the high 30s F (3 C). While not freezing, those temps are a whole other thing when there is no heating. Anywhere. And you have to sit in a classroom for hours on end without moving.

Gear Reviews

In the process of researching new gear, I found some decent reviews, but also a lot of useless complaints like, “This medium sized shirt fit horribly. It was a disaster. I’m 6’5″ tall and weigh 420 lbs…” I also found a lot of people listing their gear without talking about why they made certain choices and, more importantly, how did that work out? I’m going to make an effort to nerd out about the features of things I’m reviewing and talk about how I got to my final packing list, and then post an update after I’ve suffered with it for a while.

Coin Funnel

From reading all of these other sites I’ve also learned that, hey, I should be using affiliate links to gear so that if enough people try the things I like in the end, Amazon will sprinkle some coins on my head and I can buy a bowl of noodles on the road.

I’ve set up a scale. I have a spreadsheet. Let the reviewing begin.

I used to be like most Americans. I wore a jacket in the rain and thought umbrellas were for the weak. When I arrived in China the sun was shining, it was 90 F, and every woman on the street was under a decorated umbrella of some kind. Some carried their own; some had boys to do it for them.

Over time I discovered that it wasn’t just a weird fashion statement. In the U.S., women are obsessed with finding new ways to burn themselves like rotisserie chickens: not too much, just the right amount of brown. They spend their hard earned money on places that will let them sit inside, in artificial sunlight, and rotate and cook just long enough to look like they’ve been outside.

In China, the aesthetic of choice is the whitest possible skin. The sunscreen (although most people don’t use it) actually makes your skin lighter with bleaching chemicals. The umbrellas protect the carefully preserved skin from the ultraviolet and… there’s more. As I started to walk around with girls, as I am wont to do, I found myself underneath their little protective domes. Mysteriously, I noticed that every time I was walking around with a girl, life was more pleasant. It was ten degrees F cooler! Not only that, but when it rained instead of wrapping my body inside a jacket, trapping more of the 90 degree heat, I was nice and cool and dry.

It took a few months to break down a lifetime of American hipness training, but I finally picked up an umbrella and never looked back.

In fairness, I have to point out that Ray Jardine, ultralight backpacking freak and guru, was the first. He’s not one to fear fashion risks, to say the least, and in Beyond Backpacking: Ray Jardine’s Guide to Lightweight Hiking he talks about how much he loves umbrellas on the trail. I thought it was one of his freakier ideas when I read it years ago and had forgotten about it. Now I’m sold. Despite carrying as little as possible when I travel, I keep a little friend called the “Happy Rain” that I picked up in Taiwan tucked into my backpack and it’s a permanent part of my ultralight travel collection.

It doesn’t take much to kick off a bold and stupid new travel scheme. My injured knees cried just thinking about carrying a giant hostel geek bag with me or a mountain of sorority girl luggage. I started mixing and matching the ideas I’ve accumulated about ultralight wilderness survival and arrived at a dangerous scheme. One set of clothes. One set of backup clothes. Everything for the next two months had to fit into a small school bag.

Now it should be noted that I am not the first. It was the legendary Steve March who first attempted this scheme. He stunned us by arriving in Germany with a single tiny book bag slung over one shoulder. At one point while we were ranting about some philosophy or other he interjected with, “here, I’ve got it right here” and somehow managed to get his hand down into the bag and extract the very book we were discussing. He fit books into that crushed, squeezed, compressed airless space! The tardis-like capacity of that bag was going to be difficult to beat. It should also be noted that his part in that particular trip only lasted two weeks. I could do better.

The worst part of the project, as always, is my need for heavy equipment. As I may have to do work on the road I need my MacBook Pro. Compared with so many other options, like netbooks, this thing is like carrying a fat, screaming, hungry child down every street. Alas, I need his power to run the apps I use to build and test software and the keyboard to allow my hands to survive constant blogging.

Fortunately, modern technologies lend a hand at every turn. I used zip lock bags to compartmentalize everything because I can squeeze them down to remove excess air and still clearly see what’s inside each. Alpine cord aka parachute cord is incredibly strong, waterproof and light. With knot skills (yes, I’m pitching this again. learn them!) this stuff can be better than duct tape and it’s incredibly important for the wash scheme. Maglight now makes a tiny AAA battery sized light. An umbrella is an incredible new discovery of mine. Quick drying fake Nike shirts are available for about $3 on the student street if you get them quickly before the venders flee. Nice quick drying pants, on the other hand, cost almost as much as my flight.

I was really daunted by the clothes. I needed ultra light, fast drying gear. The fake Nikes and travel underwear were already in hand but the pants and socks were an issue. I stopped by one of the large new malls, Wanda Plaza, in Fuzhou and was stunned to find all kinds of high end American brands. There was even a J. Crew with quick drying pants… for insane prices. I couldn’t believe it and was convinced they were more expensive than in America! That means that they were expecting enough Chinese people to have reached a level of wealth that, given the exchange rate, they could pay more than 6.5 times as much for a pair of pants! Literally almost the cost of my monthly rent! Then I made another discovery.

I went home and started looking for clothes prices online. It turned out that… good equipment like camping/travel pants really were that expensive. How could I be so far off? Then I got it. I hadn’t ever paid the actual cost of clothes. Everything I wear is second hand or bought by sleeping overnight with a line of grizzly rock climbers on the lawn behind a loading doc at REI. If you sleep over and wake up early enough in line the next morning, you can rush under the slowly opening garage door and find pants for $5.40. You have to be willing to replace a button and stitch up a hole but hey, I’ve got a twenty five cent sewing needle. The fact that those very pants, on the other side of the wall, cost $100 eluded me.

So I caved in on the pants. It was heartbreaking. I found a North Face store (Yes! This blew my mind too! There is a North Face store in Fuzhou?!) and spent hours picking exactly the right pair.

The socks were trickier. I realized that what I needed were tiny, super thin socks that would dry instantly and weigh nothing. Joan Blainey sent me a really nice pair a while back so I knew what was possible but not how to find them. At last I went out and bought the cheapest dress socks I could find, knowing they’d be all polyester and no cotton to slow drying. At the last minute I did one better and found tiny dress socks made out of, if I was willing to believe my translation of the label, bamboo fibers. I love the fact that they’re bamboo so much that I’ve tricked myself into loving the socks. They also weigh as much as a nose hair and cost about two dollars, one for each sock.

And yes, at the last minute I really did cut the cord off of my battery charger and patch it back together with duct tape to save weight.

The Scheme

The scheme works like this: each night I throw that day’s clothes into the sink with a little soap. I wash them and throw them onto an impromptu clothes line using my alpine cord. The next morning they’re dry and I roll them into the bottom of the backpack.

The umbrella does a lot of things, I’ve learned in China, and is worth its own post. But for now I’ll just say this: cool when it’s raining, instant, light, portable shade when it’s not.

How It’s Working

So far it’s been amazing. I love knowing that I have absolutely everything with me. I can wander off, get on a bus and disappear at any time. I can sleep in a park. I can jump on a plane. Meanwhile, moving around the airport is a breeze. I don’t even have to know where the luggage (stress on lug) is. Outside of my big nose, I don’t even look like a traveler as I cruise the subway.

The washing process takes only minutes. These types of clothes are really easy to wash and squeeze out quickly. With a few rope tricks the line is quick and easy. (Easy loop on one end, taut line hitch on the other.) I run the cord through the clothes and throw a loop over the highest end so that they don’t slide down the line.

At the hostel, I can put everything I own in the tiny locker at night. No sweat. I have one more trick, where I carry a large, very light nylon laundry bag so that I can dump out my stuff at night into the bag and quickly sort for what I need without dealing with the tight squeeze in the backpack itself. The bag doubles as a place to unload what I don’t want to carry during the day and I just toss it into the hostel locker as I head out the door.

Lastly… the pants. Oh the pants. They work. I’m a believer. In theory I was a believer before, as my old second pair, with its newly replaced button and stitched bottoms, have always been great. But these new pants feel great, are sturdy and light and yesterday when it was raining… I walked around for about an hour before I thought, hey, how is this umbrella keeping my legs dry in this torrential downpour? I looked down to find beaded water disappearing down the front of the pants. I was perfectly dry inside. Better yet, within minutes of walking into a building… the pants were dry outside too. Sold.