Pack lightly?!

I am always impressed by people who can travel with only hand luggage, as I always seem to carry half the house with me. As much as I value simplicity, when it comes to packing, I am not very good at it.

There are always reasons for the things I ship. Flying down to the village this time I had over 100kg of cargo. Maybe a third of this was fresh vegetables for my friends at the mission hospital, plus some for me. Another portion was books and resources for the translation team, which always weigh a lot. I'm booked for 25kg on the way home, as the food will have been eaten, resources left in the village and gifts distributed.

Even for an overnight village trip I do not pack lightly, but take two bags. The first bag is my office bag, with a small library of relevant resources and all the paperwork for the work we are doing, carefully wrapped in waterproof bags in case of rain or an incident on the river. This is always the heaviest bag. My other bag is the household bag. I pack the bedroom (mattress, mosquito net, sheets, pyjamas, fresh clothes), the bathroom (soap, toothbrush, towel), the kitchen (breakfast and snacks for me; tea, coffee, sugar, salt, rice and tin fish for sharing) and emergency supplies (a small pharmacy and first aid kit, satellite phone and locator beacon). I draw the line at packing the kitchen sink, but I do bring my own spoon.

On a recent holiday I was staying somewhere that bedding and towels were provided, and we could buy food locally. I was surprised at how light my bag was when these things were provided! I kept thinking I must have missed something, but after a few days it proved that I had not. The secret to packing lightly was not that I had previously been over packing, but going somewhere that I did not need to bring half the house. That makes me feel a bit better about the cargo I usually drag about with me. It is the cost of working off-grid.