Packing: better late than early

I packed weeks in advance. And by packed, I mean I had a heap of things I was certain I’d need during my two year stint in South Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I remember getting the handbook in the mail and reading it feverishly – digesting every little morsel and trying to intuit whatever was unsaid. 

Would there be electricity? Would I have to haul water? Would people speak English? What language would I learn?

My mind spun with possibilities and uncertainties. But the certainty I had was the mounting pile on the living room floor. In retrospect, my parents were gracious. My mom didn’t nag me about it. She didn’t demand I move it to a less visible place- my room for instance. She let me place jeans and shirts, and books and journals and, my god, I don’t know what else, into that ever growing pile. 

Maybe a week before I was scheduled to leave I realized it was time to actually put things into the suitcase in preparation for my departure. I dissolved into a puddle of tears, unable to wrap my brain around the simple task before me. 

The only solution I could muster was an unintelligible and tear filled call to my then-best-friend. If she understood nothing else she understood the panic in my voice. 

I answered the door and then stood in front of mount-crap-I-don’t -need. She spent a moment taking it in and then reached for the suitcase and began to hold things up to me.

“Do you need this?” I’d answer with a feeble yes or uncertain no. Yeses were folded and put into the cavernous luggage and nos were placed in a much smaller pile just out of the way. I don’t know how long it took – forever, an instant- she zipped it up and then…magically floated back home (or more likely hugged me and then drove home).

I was packed.

Only I wasn’t. The night before my departure I weighed my bags. Whatever my limit was, I was so far beyond it that I had another bout of panic. Only this time, instead of calling for outside reinforcements I simply unzipped my suitcase and my dad’s Air Force duffle bag (in use for sentimental and no practical reasons) and began exiling contents to the now growing pile of discarded things. 

This time my bags were whittled to within a reasonable threshold of the allotted weight. Two major pieces of luggage and a carry-on bag. I thought I was traveling light.

I wasn’t. 

Now I travel light. 

My move to South Africa taught me three major lessons:

1)   If you can’t carry it comfortably you don’t need to take it

I     2) you forget it you can probably buy it and if you can’t you can probably do without

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3)Pack the night before

I’ll start with the first one:  If you can’t carry it comfortably you don’t need to take it. Two major pieces of luggage and a carry-on seem like a perfectly reasonable amount of luggage for a two-year trip. And truthfully, I wouldn’t begrudge someone that amount of luggage. But what I learned, sentimental duffle bag strap digging unsentimental cuts in my shoulder from the concentrated weight on the thin strap, was that it was heavy and awkward. Ditto for the wheeled suitcase that dug grooves into the red clay “roads” and caught on jagged rocks. Wheels weren’t practical for the kind of travel I was doing. Wheels in a village context were comical. What I needed was a good sized backpack with proper straps and no requirement of smooth surfaces to help me lug it about. 

Years later, when I moved to New Zealand for a year I remembered those lessons. I still had my wheeled suitcase, but in the well paved and sidewalked streets of Auckland that made sense. My second piece of luggage was a bright orange hiking backpack I purchased when leaving South Africa. It is still my primary piece of luggage 13 years later.

Lesson two: If you forget it you can probably buy it and if you can’t you can probably do without it. I packed a lot of things when heading to South Africa. My thinking was, “what if…” what if they didn’t have it? And so I tried to foresee every little thing I might possibly want or need. Not only is that exhausting, it is also impossible. Not only is it impossible, it also defeats, in some small way, the purpose of travel.

Sure people travel to see things. The Blue Nile Falls, Tikal, the pyramids, lions in the wild. People plan trips to cross things off of their bucket lists. But one of the reasons I travel is to experience something

different. That can be as simple as food but often includes transportation, communication, friendship. If I’ve packed my bag so full of stuff I already know there is little reason (or room) to experience new stuff.

As much as I love Sour Patch Kids (and adore the friends who sent me bags of them while I was gone) I fell in love with Jelly Babies in South Africa, and rotted my teeth with those while I lived there. I washed my clothes with Omo (which ate through my whites and the skin on my hands but wow my clothes were clean!), in Liberia I learned how to start a coal pot (environmentalists close your eyes- I knotted a polystyrene bag in several places to make a wick, piled the charcoal around it and lit the top) and made boot-leg Pad Thai with instant noodles, onions, egg, and peanut butter on the coal powered stove, and in Uganda learned to make a stovetop pineapple upside down cake that made me quite popular. Those are all things I associate exclusively, not with my time in America but, with specific times in specific countries. 

There is also just the practicality of what I actually need. My early letters home to my parents during that first trip, I mentioned things I didn’t have but “needed”. I talked about things like isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. A few months into my stay things began to settle and began to learn my new home. Fast forward a year and my family came to visit and they came baring gifts…among them, things I lamented the absence of in my early weeks away but had long forgotten or replaced with the local equivalent – Dettol for instance. It was the sweetest of gestures from my family, but unnecessary once I began to make South Africa home.

Finally, I’ve learned: Pack the night before. My first grown-up international trip trained me and I haven’t managed to break the habit yet. It drives my mother crazy even all these years later. When she knows I have a trip planned she’ll begin asking me a week or two out, “have you packed yet?”. My answer is always the same, “When do I leave?”.

It isn’t that I don’t think about what I need to pack, or even that I don’t make a tiny pile off to the side somewhere of things that will probably make their way into my bag(s) (anything less than a year and the chances of me having more than one big bag and a daypack are slim…circa lesson one); but why would I do it early? What good does that do? As long as I have my ticket, my passport, and cash, any packing omissions can be rectified. And besides, it gives me something to focus on in the anticipatory moments before a trip. I’m sure there are reasonable reasons why I should pack in advance but that isn’t my way and in travel preparation I am apparently a creature of habit.

Fifteen years ago I left on my first major trip and these are the things I learned and I continue to follow these basic lessons wherever I go. 

A few years ago when I was moving to Uganda I was packing my bag in the wee hours of the morning. One of my nieces padded down the stairs heading for her parents’ room because she had a bad dream. I intercepted, opting to let them sleep while I soothed her. I was a few hours from my flight to Kampala and clothes were still strewn about the dining room but I took a moment to sit down with my niece on my lap and rock her gently back to sleep. A few hours later my brother-in-law snapped a picture to capture the moment of me fast asleep sitting upright with my niece across my lap.

I hadn’t finished packing before I dozed off. For my mom that was a lesson in why I should pack early, for myself it was simply affirmation I was doing things right, I made my flight fully(ish) packed and on time. I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way.