Cubed

On most occasions Jillian and I are extremely light packers, the sort to carry a child-sized backpack for a weekend getaway or a trip to a friends' apartment. And that includes sleeping bags. This is mostly due to Jillian's ability to roll up a pair of underwear to the size of a highlighter and my willingness to make one tee shirt last an entire Thanksgiving weekend.

Our big failure on this front came during the trip home from Macedonia, but I kind of think this doesn't count since we were trying to bring back everything after two years. Still, we take great pride in our packing abilities and so we were determined to make everything fit in four, sub 50-pound suitcases. We didn't have a scale on hand to verify the weight of each bag, but rather we were left to guess based on how much our shoulders burned when we lifted one suitcase. And they did burn, which should have been our first clue that things were about to go terribly amiss.

The sky was still dark when we arrived at the Sofia, Bulgaria, airport and happily approached the unsmiling faces behind the desk at Czech Air. We were going home...what could possibly break the mood? Oh, perhaps four bags weighing 60, 62, 65, and 68 pounds and two check-in agents who pulled a -14 on the sympathy scale? Sorry, they said, those bags need to weigh less than 50 pounds each or we'll be confiscating your life savings. Jillian pleaded with them, explaining that we had just spent the last two years teaching English and generally saving children from the dregs of residual Communist thinking. And collecting bottles and jars of Macedonian treats.

[PICTURE OF TRAUMATIC EVENT NOT FOUND]

Then: 1) The pleading didn't work. 2) Jillian cried and cursed them out. 3) We opened every suitcase on the floor of the terminal and began throwing things out (clothes, books, jars of food, a make-up case, shoes). 4) I had a hard time getting these two women to even give us a trash bag in which to place all these perfectly good items. A security guard loitered in the area, watching us furiously stuff the trash bag full. When I asked him where I could throw the bag out, he told me to leave it there, sitting on the floor in the middle of the terminal. We were in a hurry, so we shuffled off, but I glanced back once and saw what was clearly a terrorist alert in the making: a giant, unattended package slumped on the polished floor in an increasingly crowded airport. Maybe it was the guard's first week on the job or perhaps he was waiting for us to climb the escalator before he loaded our stuff into his car.

For our approaching trip to Asia, not only are we committed to avoiding international incidents, but we also have our eyes set on light and efficient packing. Efficiency can be quite elusive when you're talking about backpacks--it always seems the item you need is buried at the bottom, thus requiring the removal of everything else, which in turn disrupts the careful folding and packing you just spent 15 minutes at the hostel accomplishing. The inevitable problem child is the sweatshirt--keep it near the top and you'll encounter record high temperatures; bury it and you'll soon have chattering teeth.

Well, some wiz solved this problem for us with the simple, miraculous Packing Cube. Seriously, this is the stuff of Jillian's dreams. I'm a bit surprised she didn't invent this herself. By packing all our items into these little mesh cubes and then stacking the cubes into our packs... compartmentalization! I fully expect these little wonders to come in quite handy during the trip. Want a shirt? Just pull out the shirt cube. Looking to switch out those sneakers for some flip-flops? Yeah, there's a footwear cube, too.

Packing: check!

For three months, that's everything...aren't those packing cubes so cute?

Go East

Lonely Planet’s guide to India is over 1,200 pages long, which means that in addition to containing just about everything a budget traveler needs to know about the sub-continent, it also doubles as a paperweight and a barbell. A copy is currently sitting on the downstairs table at my parent’s house. The book is huge and pristine, yet to be opened and yet to be smudged by our flipping thumbs. Right now I’m just considering the book, as if the moment I crack it open our trip really begins and I really have to start thinking about what we need to do, to plan, to purchase, to look up in further detail, to stress about. So Lonely Planet India sits on the table.

It’s got some company. There are also guides about Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. These are slimmer, more manageable books and thus they’ve already been explored, highlighted, and discussed a bit. Notable sites noted. Suggested itineraries considered. Known scams highlighted and underlined. India will just have to wait, like the king piece on the chess board. First we have to get through the rooks and bishops.

The planning will continue until mid-January, when we leave for our trip. It’s our post-Peace Corps celebration. All returned volunteers receive what’s called a “readjustment allowance” to help make the transition back home a bit easier. We decided a long time ago that, for us, this allowance was much better spent taking us to a new corner of the world. After giving Africa some serious consideration, we picked Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam), India, and Nepal. We’ll travel them in that order for approximately three months and what ultimately swung our decision to Asia was the fact that it’s the driest and coolest time of the year in that region. No better time to go.

So this blog will follow our trip, follies and all. Prior to the internet and the rise of blogs, a trip like this would be related to friends and family postmortem, after returning home. I hope this account, written undigested as we travel, proves to be interesting, insightful, and honest.

Enjoy!