Travelling Light

I noticed something interesting when I arrived at the airport in China for my recent trip and, from the assorted comments from my fellow travellers, other people noticed it too. The size of my luggage was so much smaller than everyone else's. I'm happy to report that that isn't any kind of euphemism, just a reference to the bags I was carrying. Mostly they had multiple suitcases, in some instances rather large ones. A few of them were travelling fairly light, with single large suitcases, but I had them all beat. For a twelve day trip I had a bag that was twenty inches long by twelve inches wide by nine inches deep. It weighed about eight kilos.

It's a trick that years of travelling have given me. For the twelve days, I had a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, enough underwear to last and, purely because I knew I'd be visiting somewhere where smartness wasn't optional, a pair of decent trousers, a button up shirt and a tie.

I used to take as much luggage as anyone else but since I realised that I don't need it my bags have become lighter with every trip. I'm hoping one day to get it down to being able to travel with just what I can carry in my pockets, until then I'll just go on using smaller and smaller bags.
And that was it, everything apart from my documents.