Hitting the road for an extended period of time? If so, you’ll need to balance being light and nimble with being prepared and connected! We spent 365 days backpacking around the world, and here is a list of the 5 things we found the most useful during our travels.
1. GPS DEVICE
Full disclosure: we didn’t discover this item through our own research. When we told our friends and neighbors we were leaving the country for a year, they threw us a farewell party and gave us a Spot Gen3 tracking device as a going away present.
The Spot Gen3 is a small, 4″x 3″ GPS device which transmits its location via satellite every 10min (you can select different frequencies). It allows your friends and family to keep track of your location, even when you travel outside of cell service. It really helped keep our parents’ minds at ease, as they could monitor our journey with up-to-the-minute accuracy via a password-protected shared page share.findmespot.com. (Although, it did create a small amount of anxiety for Igor’s mother when she saw us unexpectedly backtracking when we got a flat tire in Botswana. We got a frantic email from her asking us if we had been kidnapped, as our Spot was traveling in the wrong direction!)
In the event that something *does* go wrong, the Spot Gen3 has two options to call for help: an assist button that alerts an emergency contact that you pre-programed on your account, and an SOS button that contacts an international emergency response center who will forward your coordinates to the nearest authorities to you (reserved for life-threatening purposes only). Luckily, we never needed to call for help, but it gave us the confidence we needed to venture out solo into some incredibly beautiful and remote locations.
At USD $169.95, the Spot Gen3 was an incredibly generous gift from our friends (thank you!), and it also requires a subscription service plan to active the device. The Basic Plan costs USD $149.95 for the first year (if you call to renew after 12 months, they will offer a significantly reduced rate), so it’s not a small expense. But if you’re constant the move and if you are going into remote territory alone, it’s a wise investment.
The only times the Spot Gen3 failed us, was in Antarctica (not on their coverage map, so that was expected) and in China. We frequently got “red light” alerts that the Spot Gen3 was having trouble pinpointing our location using satellite GPS, or discovered that the recorded coordinates were incorrect when we reviewed our saved tracks. Upon during some research online, discovered that the Chinese government restricts geographic data by scrambling the signal (which can only be unscrambled with a government permit).
Initially, we were really excited about the ability to download a map of our tracking activity and save it as a record of our journey. Unfortunately, the Spot Gen3 only archives data for 30 days, so we had to remember to login and save a copy of our “tracks” every month. Sadly, after we got home and terminated our tracking service we discovered that Spot deleted our account along with all of our saved maps. Boo.
2. CREDIT CARD WITH TRAVELER REWARDS
Less than a week before we left the country, Igor opened a Citi Prestige credit card. Touted as the “Best Credit Card for Travel,” we were lured in by the following tantalizing travel rewards:
- 40,000 miles good toward any airline (after spending USD $4,000 in 3 months. Not difficult on a trip like this – we paid off the balance of our RV rental in New Zealand in the first month and were already done with this requirement)
- VIP Priority Pass for free access to hundreds of airport lounges, for both cardholder *and* guest (this policy may have changed this year to only include the cardholder)
- USD $250 air travel credit once per year
- USD $100 credit for 1 Global Entry application fee (Igor got to take advantage of this – Lindsay didn’t)
There are more rewards possible when actually booking tours and hotels through the Citi Concierge, but we never took advantage of those.
Even though the credit card had a USD $500 annual fee (which we only paid once, as we immediately canceled the card once we returned to the States on day 365), we more than got our money’s worth. The USD $250 air travel credit alone cut the net cost in half. We were able to use the 40,000 miles to purchase our domestic flights within Argentina, which would have otherwise cost us USD $400pp. Finally, the VIP lounge access was a GODSEND. We ended up saving so much money on meals, booze and internet access, that we are positive that we came out ahead with this card! There are other cards like this (Chase Sapphire is another one, with almost identical benefits).
Chillin’ in the lounge one Day 1 – the first of many VIP lounges!
Now there were a few drawbacks. When we foolishly used the credit card in Bali and it got compromised, we had a rough time getting a replacement. Since we were still in Indonesia, we tried to have them send our new card to our hotel, but the fraud department thought it was too suspicious and rerouted it to our home address instead. This was incredibly annoying, as we were only on month 3 of our travels, and would not be back in the USA for 9 more months! After 2 more attempts at sending the card failed (apparently Indonesia is a red flag zone for Citi – their fraud department canceled the shipment each time, despite numerous attempts to override with managers), we finally got the card shipped to our hotel in Malaysia.
We considered keeping the Citi Prestige Card when we got back to the USA, however the benefits outlined above would not be used enough with domestic travel so it no longer made financial sense. For one thing, the VIP Priority Pass doesn’t have very good coverage in domestic airports in the USA – our main airport, JFK, for example only has a Priority Pass lounge in the Delta terminal, which we never use as we are American fliers. And while having Global Entry was a nice perk when returning to the USA, it’s useless everywhere else, so unless you are planning to come in and out of the country repeatedly, you won’t get much use out of it.
3. PACSAFE BACKPACK & MONEY BELT
While researching other travelers’ blogs in preparation for this trip, Igor read dozens of horror stories of travelers getting pickpocketed in a variety of scenarios:
- slashing your bag from underneath your bus seat
- opening your bag in the overhead bin while you are asleep during an overnight flight
- breaking into your hotel room while you are out sightseeing
- plus plenty of good, old fashioned mugging stories
In an attempt to protect our expensive electronic gear and passports while we were either in transit or at a hotel, Igor found the mother of all anti-theft travel bags: the Pacsafe Z-28. For USD $199, this baby was like Fort Knox: it had a stainless steel wire mesh built into the outer lining of the bag so it was completely slash-proof, and the mouth of the bag had a 2′ metal cable that looped through grommets, allowing you to lock the bag to a stationary object (bed, pole, car seat, etc.) to make sure no one could pick up the bag and take it without either destroying hotel furniture or using a bolt cutter.
The bag was small (20.9″ high x 13.0″ wide x 6.7″ deep – 28L capacity) and light enough that Igor was able to wear it during our 3-night trek in New Zealand, although it’s definitely not as comfortable as a hiking backpack. And while it didn’t have the volume capacity of the hiking backpack we brought, it didn’t really need it as all the electronics were small, but heavy. Packing more stuff in that bag would have made the weight distribution between the two of us too uneven. As it was, we were both shouldering our fair share.
A security belt that you can dress up or dress down!
As far as the money belt goes, most people bring the wide, flesh-colored “fanny pack” style belts that are supposed to hide under your clothes – and, admittedly, we did bring a pair of those too for our passports. But we also brought a third, even more discreet belt: the Thomas Bates Hiker Money Belt. From the outside, this USD $20 belt looked like a plain canvas, grip-buckle belt – nothing more than a practical fashion accessory. However, when flipped it over, there was a 1.5″ x 24″ zipped compartment where we were able to hide USD $500+ in folded $100 bills, plus a memory card with digital copies of our IDs and travel insurance info. While we never had any security problems during our trip, the extra cash in the belt came handy on more than one occasion where we had forgotten to hit up an ATM before travelling to a remote location.
4. CLOUD SERVICE
Back in college, Lindsay had a friend who went to Germany for a week. Poor girl had her backpack stolen from her hostel dorm room in the middle of the night and lost her camera, which had all her pictures on it – tragic! Even though we had a good deal of expensive equipment with us, the only things that were truly irreplaceable were our photos. So even though memory cards are massive nowadays, and can easily hold thousands of pictures, we didn’t want to risk losing our most precious possessions in the event we were robbed of literally everything we had.
It may have been overkill, but Igor opened TWO Cloud Service accounts for us: one with Microsoft OneDrive @ USD $99.99/year and a second with Amazon which we got for free for being Prime Members @ USD $10.99/mo. Whenever we had any internet access, we religiously uploaded the day’s pictures to the cloud, thus freeing up space on our memory cards & computers, safe guarding our memories, and giving our parents (who had access to our shared folders) sneek peeks of our travels (as Lindsay was typically 2 weeks behind on her daily blog entries).
5. KINDLE
When you are on the road for a year, you need to keep your bags as light as possible, therefore carrying books is out of the question. Even if you plan to use book exchanges at hostels, the extra weight of even ONE paperback can feel back-breaking.
While an e-reader seems like a no-brainer to keep avid readers entertained on long bus rides, during airport layovers, etc., the Amazon Kindle (USD $60 for the basic 6″, black & white screen) was far more useful than just giving Lindsay novels to read. About halfway through the trip, Lindsay decided to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (normally USD $10/month), which gives you unlimited downloads from their Unlimited Library. Obviously, this isn’t really as good as it sounds – you are limited to only 10 books at a time, and the “Unlimited” library does NOT have every book. In fact, it has a very poor selection of books, but they do have a handful of gems which suckered Lindsay into trying it out:
- full series of Harry Potter books
- full series of The Hunger Games
- hundreds of Lonely Planet Travel Guides
The Lonely Planet books were super helpful for us. Lindsay downloaded 10 books right before we entered China (where government censorship blocked our access to Google and Wikipedia, making travel research very difficult), so we had a wealth of information with us at all times. Lindsay was also very sneaky: after downloading the maximum number of books to her Kindle, she switched the e-reader to airplane mode and canceled the free trial. As long as the Kindle wasn’t hooked up to Wifi, she could keep the books as long as she wanted! And while Kindle Unlimited had a 10 book maximum check-out, the Kindle itself could hold many more books than that. Did you know that local libraries now carry e-books? Throughout the trip, Lindsay was able to check-out and download books from New York Public Library as well as the Glen Cove Public Library using her digital sign-ins. She read dozens of novels this year, and didn’t pay for a single one.
One note of advice however: make sure to bring a padded cover for your e-reader! Lindsay didn’t have one, and luckily managed to keep the Kindle safe for 11.5 months of the trip. However, she must have packed the Kindle against something sharp during our Machu Picchu trek, as the screen was permanently damaged. Sadly, it doesn’t look like there is any way to repair it even now that we are home. Sigh – RIP, Kindle.
Don’t let this happen to you!