Travel Gear

» Vango Planet 60 + 15
After thorough research, I opted for the Vango Planet range, a hybrid of both a comfortable carrying rucksack and load lugging travel bag. It is very comfortable indeed, has an adequate size, front opening, a rain and protection cover included and a removable day pack with front pocket. It is a great value for the money.

» Lowepro Computrekker AW
Concerning bags for professional cameras and digital equipment in general, Loewpro is probably the best brand in the market. I choose a Lowepro Computrekker AW (All Weather) and it was perfect to carry my small laptop and all my Nikon photo digital equipment. A first-class backpack for the laptop and my D100 Nikon digital camera and lenses.

Guess what? You can buy t-shirts pretty much everywhere. I mean, there's no reason to carry too many clothes for a long trip. I think I could easily have travelled with less travel clothes than these ones:

» 1 Solo Climb - Ergo jacket with a Textrem layer (a layer equivalent to Gore-Tex);
» 1 MEC rain pants (useless most of the time);
» 1 long-sleeved shirt;
» 4 cotton t-shirts;
» 2 trekking shirts - Haglöfs and Columbia;
» 2 light pants, one of them convertible;
» 1 swimsuit/shorts;
» 3 underwear;
» 4 different types of socks, including a trekking pair and a Polartec one;
» Thermal underwear, for extremely low temperatures;
» Polartec gloves and a comfy cap;

» 1 pair Gore-Tex trekking boots;
» 1 pair Columbia Trail Meister sport sandals;
» 1 pair Brazilian havaianas flip flops (I forgot them somewhere near Sapa, Vietnam). Replaced by a pair of flip-flops bought in a street market somewhere in Southeast Asia for one dollar, end up being what I wore most of the time, until I arrived in Brazil and bought another pair of Havaianas flip flops (I love them!).

» Nikon D100
I had to send a weekly travel article and pictures for a newspaper while travelling so, for obvious reasons, I choose digital equipment. I've always used Nikon and. even tough there was a better (and more expensive) camera on the market, Nikon D100 digital camera had all the technical features I needed and, in my opinion, it was an adequate digital camera for the goals and characteristics of this task. Good value for the money. It turned out to be an excellent choice.

» Lenses
I choose to travel with two very lightweight and versatile lenses, good enough for this project: Nikkor AF-S 12-24mm f/4G ED-IF DX and Nikkor AF-S 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IG VR.

» Accessories
Tripod (I gave it to a Russian friend during the first week of the trip, as it was too big and heavy to carry). Polarizer filter. Two 512Mb SanDisk memory cards. Extra battery.

» ASUS laptop series S5200N (Europe)
Choosing a laptop to travel with is not easy. It has to be small, lightweight, with long autonomy and cheap. I decided to go for a 12' laptop and, by the time I research the option available on the market, I choose an Asus laptop, series S5200N (Europe), with two batteries, 40 GB hard disk, 512 MB ram memory, wireless, external CD writer. Total weight was just 2,28 Kg.

» Mini optical mouse
Even working on a very small laptop, a mouse is crucial to edit photos.

» USB 128Mb Memory Flash
That's what I used to transfer the data from my small laptop to computers at internet cafes worldwide.

» Compact Flash card reader
Small and extremely cheap, it was very useful to accelerate the downloading of digital pictures from the Nikon D100 digital camera memory cards to the laptop.

» Power adaptor
Great little travel accessory I found completely by accident at an European airport, this Swiss World Adaptor weighting just 114 gr solved most of the problems concerning charging digital equipment I had on the trip.

I took with me a handful of small travel accessories. Some of them were very useful while travelling, but others turned out to be completely worthless:

» Headlamp Petzl Zipka Plus, very helpful and lightweight (65 gr);
» Silk Bag Liner, weighting only 220g, as a precaution for some not so clean dorms or guesthouses;
» Ultra light PackTowl towel (forgot it in Moscow, after just a week travelling);
» Pac-safe, to protect the small laptop and the photo digital equipment (I must admit that I didn't feel very comfortable using the Pac-Safe so I ended up not using it more than a dozen times);
» SIGG bottle (sent home after a couple of months without any use);
» Tiny calculator to quickly convert currencies (broken in Hanoi);
» Fishing line (almost useless);
» Alarm clock, handy for that early morning bus or flight you don't want to miss;
» Tiny compass, bough in the Muslim quarter of Chengdu, China. It is unbelievable how useful this one dollar little thing might be, especially in big cities;
» MP3 player, bough in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for those moments you feel like listening to your music.