Go Lightly:
Traveling Fast & cheap Doesn't Have to be Hell
by Jeremy Hart
In my defense, it wasn't all my idea. My soon-to-be bride and I had thrown around places we'd wanted to go for months, and we'd both agreed that Morocco would be a very cool place to visit (in fact, she initially suggested it). So, when it came time to do some planning for our honeymoon, Morocco seemed like the obvious choice.
We made some arrangements, decided to travel through Spain as well (on the advice of my fiancée's dad, who warned us that two weeks in Morocco would probably be more than enough), then decided to tack on a side-trip to Paris, and finally bought tickets that took us home from London. At a grand total of four weeks, it was a fairly ambitious trip, time-wise, but we felt confident that we had it together. We'd both ranted and railed at length on various occasions about how crappy "tourist" vacations always are, and how we wanted to do something different, and after discussing it, we agreed to do the trip on our own. Unfortunately, as the day drew closer, it became apparent that we weren't totally in agreement on all the points of the plan.
"We're staying in real hotels, right?" she asked one evening. Caught off-guard, I fumbled for a moment and then responded cautiously that sure, hotels were fine, as long as they were cheap, but that I'd figured we'd stay at hostels where possible, myself.
"What?" she said, shaking her head firmly. "No. Sorry, but I'm not a college student anymore; I'm not staying in a dorm room in some dingy hostel!"
Luckily, I'd done some research and some budgetary calculations, and managed to demonstrate to her that hotels in Spain would be on the expensive side; I added, however, that hotels in Morocco looked to be a lot cheaper. Sighing, she grudgingly conceded to the idea.
The next bump in the road came when I started packing. I am a complete packing freak, having learned at the knee of my father, who has been known to pack and repack whole minivans of gear for hours on end; it got to the point where he had to be left alone to do it all himself, screaming and swearing the whole time, and sadly, I must confess that I'm now following in his footsteps. At any rate, I'd bought my fiancée a pack similar to mine as a gift, thinking that she'd be pleased with my thoughtfulness, at least, if not necessarily with my sense of style. When I presented the pack to her, however, her eyes widened and her mouth tightened into a hard line.
"I can not fit everything I need for four weeks into that," she declared angrily. "I'm bringing my suitcases." I protested at this, warning her that it would be easier to hop off and on the various ferries, buses and trains we'd be taking on our trip, but she became even angrier as I spoke.
"No way in hell!" she yelled. "I'm not going to lug a backpack around on my honeymoon. And why do we have to take the damn ferry, anyway? Can't we just fly from Morocco up to Paris, and go from there?"
Oops. It turned out that we both had developed very different ideas as to the nature of the trip itself; where I thought that "doing it ourselves" meant traveling light and cheap, and leaving ourselves open to whatever might come our way, she took that same credo to mean that we wouldn't book it all through a tour company, but would still stay at nice hotels and travel comfortably (which made sense, seeing as, uh, it was our honeymoon). Uh-oh.
In the end, after many hours of delicate negotiations, I was able to coax her into giving the light-and-cheap option a shot, but only after some bargaining -- since this was "my" trip, she got to pick the next, which she decided would be a luxury cruise. This, she insisted, would be her last backpacking "fling."
So, we got married and headed out, and we wandered through Spain and Morocco, then up through France and England before flying home four weeks later. And, despite my fears that maybe I'd made a foolish decision that could very well ruin our marriage, and that she would be miserable living out of a backpack (particularly in a Third World country), well, she loved it, especially Morocco. Halfway through our stay, she'd decided we needed to come back someday, and soon. There were ups and downs, to be sure (always sit in a train car with working air-conditioning, if possible), and we did stay at a few real dives -- although the truly bad hotels we ended up at were actually in Spain, not Morocco -- but overall, we had a blast together, and it was an unforgettable trip.
Before we had even boarded the plane home, my wife was making lists of destinations for our next trip -- not the luxury cruise, as she had threatened (although we might do that, too), but a footloose ramble, instead, across the Czech Republic, Russia, and everywhere in-between. Or maybe we'd head for Thailand and the Far East. Or Italy. Or Peru. She was absolutely giddy with the prospect of deciding where to go next.
My point here is this: people who claim that they don't like to travel light, in my view, probably haven't ever tried it. And why not? We live in the age of ultimate portability, where a good sleeping bag fits into a stuff-sack the size of a football, a water purifier doesn't weigh a ton or take two hours to get rid of all those pesky parasites, and you no longer even need pack animals or porters to cart your gear around with you; these days, if you do it right, you really can live out of just a backpack, sometimes even for months or years at a time. The hard part is just getting out there and giving it a shot.
Now, while I won't claim to be any kind of travel guru, I have come up with a few hints to help keep things truly portable:
1. Look for luggage that's easy to carry. I don't mean that there have to be padded cushions at every point where it touches your body, but rather, that there should be things like handles, compression straps, and hide-away shoulder straps. Just having a comfortable handle, believe it or not, can make all the difference -- I lugged a 9-foot surfboard across the entire length of LAX once, and the handle on the thing just about did permanent damage to my hand. My own backpack is one of my most prized possessions partly because it's comfortable and easy to carry (that, and because it's got a hidden pull-out rain cover that works great for sudden tropical monsoons). Rolling luggage is great for airports, but not so great for when you're tramping through the shantytown at 10PM, trying to find your hotel.
2. Realize that ultra-technological stuff is not always necessary. I love my handheld, but would I take it to some remote South American rainforest with me? No chance. Why not? Well, for one, because I'd be utterly lost if I broke it or if somebody absconded with it, but for another, because it can't do anything for me there that a simple pen and some paper can. The thing about most gizmos -- even the super-portable kind -- is that they're nice, but not necessary. Save the space for the necessities (like toilet paper, of which you should always have what initially seems like a ridiculous amount). And hey, fancier and newer isn't always better -- the single most useful traveling tool I've ever owned is a little compass that clips onto my watchband. Sure, it makes me look like a big dork, but hey, it helped us find our hotel in Tangiers' tangled medina and led me through a deserted rainforest park in Fiji, so who cares? People seem to generally equate "portable" with "shiny and electronic," but believe me, that's not always the case.
3. Remember that you don't need to bring everything you might possibly need. Unless you're traveling to someplace
like Antarctica or the steppes of Mongolia, chances are the someone
nearby will be willing to sell you whatever it is you need. In
our modern era of rampant capitalism, this goes for just about
anything, really -- I was bowled over to find a full series of
Linux manuals, for example, sitting on the shelf of a run-down
booksellers' street stall in Fès. Welcome to the global
marketplace. (A corollary to the above, by the way, is that you
almost certainly will forget something. Unless it's your
wedding band or, say, a kidney, however, you can probably either
do without or find a replacement along the way. Heck, I know
somebody who managed to leave for a week-long trip and forget
all her underwear, and yes, she did indeed survive.)
Jeremy Hart returns from his travels with a worthy travel partner who might possibly out-do him.
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