Ryan's Travel Tip: Forget the Pants

One of the last things anyone wants to hear upon landing is that their luggage didn’t make it with them to their final destination. Especially when traveling to remote or developing countries, finding out at baggage claim that you are going to be without your luggage for an indeterminate amount of time can be devastating. That’s why, over the years, I have learned to approach the packing and checking of my luggage in a very specific way. It is pretty simple once you hear it, but I’m going to share it with you nonetheless, because it has made a huge impact on my life and saved me a countless number of headaches:

Don’t check anything that will be difficult (or even impossible) to find at your new location.

Or, put another way,

Keep everything that is indispensable either on your person or in your carryon.

Simple, right? But this can sometimes be counterintuitive, as you often have to reevaluate what you consider to be “indispensable.”

For example, we can all agree that no matter where you are going, you will probably need some pants; but what destination, regardless of how poor or remote, doesn’t have pants for sale? The answer is, none. They all do. They all have pants.

Even the most rudimentary village will be able to rustle you up some sort of lower body covering. It might be made out of grass or papyrus or something else terrible and itchy, but they will invariably be able to produce some sort of garment for you to wear.

However, what a small jungle tribe or a nomadic desert community is unlikely to have, is a collection of cables, batteries, and chargers that fit your particular camera. Guard these with your life!

It is probably obvious that you’d want to keep all your camera bodies and lenses with you at all times, but what good are these things if they are completely dead, because you packed all their accessories, chargers, and cables in your checked bag? You f*cked up.

Finding a replacement for these items is nearly impossible. For example, in Uganda we learned that even locating an extra memory card for a specific camera would involve a boat ride, a small plane, and several days in a car. And then, of course, there’s always a chance that you will get there and - due to some communication error - they don’t really have the exact cable you need. They have something similar (but useless), and the component you actually need will take almost a week to arrive. In layman’s terms, you’re shit out of luck.

So now, your entire photography expedition has come to a grinding halt, all because you mistakenly thought it was more important to fill your carryon with ubiquitous items like shirts and pants, rather than the esoteric charging components that your cameras need in order to function.

The lesson here is, forget the pants. Even if you only have the one outfit with you that you wore on the plane (and the rest of your precious clothing is in checked baggage that your Apple AirTag shows you has inexplicably been diverted to Amsterdam, wtf?!!!), even the smallest, most remote tribal community will have some way of washing that outfit for you.

You can just sit in a grass skirt for a couple hours and wait. A few itchy hours is infinitely better than the alternative, which is wasting several days in multiple vehicles trying to hunt down an elusive camera component that may or may not even exist in that country.

And yeah, be prepared, you are probably going to be stopped by every TSA agent and security personnel known to man. Your carryon bag is admittedly going to look insane, and in every country and every checkpoint you go through, they are going to have questions.

For many years now, my bag has been a crazy jumble of camera components, electronics, cords, and pills. Yes, pills— because the other thing you will have a hard time finding in developing countries is medicine of the exact variety (and strength!) that you are used to in America.

Like the esoteric camera battery or memory card, many developing countries will have a medicine that is similar to but not quite the medicine you are needing. It will usually be much less potent or not quite appropriate for solving the malady at hand, and that is why you always pack about three times more medication than you imagine you might need.

Not to mention, whatever medication you have left over will undoubtedly be appreciated when you donate it to the local community at the end of your expedition. Believe me, they are all very aware that their sad, weak (often expired) versions of our extra-strength American medications sucks, too. Leave everything you can realistically part with behind, with the local population.

Yes, your ridiculous carryon bag of pills and cables is going to look bonkers through the airport x-ray machines, but explaining it all to a security agent still takes much less time than trying to locate DayQuil in the Himalayas, Mefloquine in Botswana, or Claritin in the Sahara. (Or camera equipment anywhere!)

Trust me.

Likewise, sitting in a grass skirt for a couple hours while you outfit gets washed is still less itchy than running out of cortisone cream in Uganda.

Forget the pants. It’s medications and camera gear that you need to keep close.

Seriously, write this down.

You’re welcome.

*************************************

If it's actually jungle stuff you'd wanted to read about when you naively clicked on this photo, no worries, go HERE!