Dark Mode Toggle
My 40-liter backpack travel guide
2022 Jun 20<br>See all posts
My 40-liter backpack travel guide
Special thanks to Liam Horne for feedback and review. I received<br>no money from and have never even met any of the companies making the<br>stuff I'm shilling here (with the sole exception of Unisocks); this is<br>all just an honest listing of what works for me today.
I have lived as a nomad for the last nine years, taking 360 flights<br>travelling over 1.5 million kilometers (assuming flight paths are<br>straight, ignoring layovers) during that time. During this time, I've<br>considerably optimized the luggage I carry along with me: from a<br>60-liter shoulder bag with a separate laptop bag, to a 60-liter shoulder<br>bag that can contain the laptop bag, and now to a 40-liter packpage that<br>can contain the laptop bag along with all the supplies I need to live my<br>life.
The purpose of this post will be to go through the contents, as well<br>as some of the tips that I've learned for how you too can optimize your<br>travel life and never have to wait at a luggage counter again. There is<br>no obligation to follow this guide in its entirety; if you have<br>important needs that differ from mine, you can still get a lot of the<br>benefits by going a hybrid route, and I will talk about these options<br>too.
This guide is focused on my own experiences; plenty of other people<br>have made their own guides and you should look at them too. /r/onebag is an excellent<br>subreddit for this.
The backpack, with the various sub-bags laid out separately. Yes,<br>this all fits in the backpack, and without that much effort to pack and<br>unpack.
As a point of high-level organization, notice the bag-inside-a-bag<br>structure. I have a T-shirt bag, an underwear bag, a sock bag, a<br>toiletries bag, a dirty-laundry bag, a medicine bag, a laptop bag, and<br>various small bags inside the inner compartment of my backpack, which<br>all fit into a 40-liter<br>Hynes Eagle backpack. This structure makes it easy to keep things<br>organized.
It's like<br>frugality, but for cm3 instead of dollars
The general principle that you are trying to follow is that you're<br>trying to stay within a "budget" while still making sure you have<br>everything that you need - much like normal financial planning of the<br>type that almost everyone, with the important exception of crypto<br>participants during bull runs, is used to dealing with. A key difference<br>here is that instead of optimizing for dollars, you're optimizing for<br>cubic centimeters. Of course, none of the things that I<br>recommend here are going to be particularly hard on your dollars either,<br>but minimizing cm3 is the primary objective.
What do I mean by this? Well, I mean getting items like this:
Electric shaver. About 5cm long and 2.5cm wide at the top.<br>No charger or handle is required: it's USBC pluggable, your phone is the<br>charger and handle. Buy on<br>Amazon here (told you it's not hard on your<br>dollars!)
And this:
Charger for mobile phone and laptop (can charge both at the<br>same time)! About 5x5x2.5 cm. Buy here.
And there's more. Electric toothbrushes are normally known for being<br>wide and bulky. But they don't have to be! Here<br>is an electric toothbrush that is rechargeable, USBC-friendly (so no<br>extra charging equipment required), only slightly wider than a regular<br>toothbrush, and costs about $30, plus a couple dollars every few months<br>for replacement brush heads. For connecting to various different<br>continents' plugs, you can either use any<br>regular reasonably small universal adapter, or get the Zendure<br>Passport III which combines a universal adapter with a charger, so<br>you can plug in USBC cables to charge your laptop and multiple other<br>devices directly (!!).
As you might have noticed, a key ingredient in making this<br>work is to be a USBC maximalist. You should strive to ensure that every<br>single thing you buy is USBC-friendly. Your laptop, your phone,<br>your toothbrush, everything. This ensures that you don't need to carry<br>any extra equipment beyond one charger and 1-2 charging cables. In the<br>last ~3 years, it has become much easier to live the USBC maximalist<br>life; enjoy it!
Be a Uniqlo maximalist
For clothing, you have to navigate a tough tradeoff between price,<br>cm3 and the clothing looking reasonably good. Fortunately,<br>many of the more modern brands do a great job of fulfilling all three at<br>the same time! My current strategy is to be a Uniqlo maximalist:<br>altogether, about 70% of the clothing items in my bag are from<br>Uniqlo.
This includes:
8 T-shirts, of which 6 are this<br>type from Uniqlo
8 pairs of underwear, mostly various Uniqlo products
8 socks, of which none are Uniqlo (I'm less confident about what to<br>do with socks than with other clothing items, more on this later)
Heat-tech tights,<br>from Uniqlo
Heat-tech sweater, from Uniqlo
Packable jacket, from Uniqlo
Shorts that also double as a swimsuit, from.... ok fine, it's also<br>Uniqlo.
There are other stores that can give you often equally good products,<br>but Uniqlo is easily accessible in many...