How to lose a backpack gracefully

Posted by Kate Goss on 19 January 2012

It’s called pack-perving. The thing that all travellers do upon entering a backpackers’ dormitory and laying eyes upon a backpack that is slighter, more compact, smaller, sexier, or better-equipped than one’s own.

Our seven nomadic months in South America brought about a fair amount of this, owing to the fact that no matter how many blogs we read or how many people told us to take the bare-naked (completely stripped and starkers) minimum, we still managed to do the inevitable and pack too much stuff.

When this happens, you can (and will) spend hours justifying to yourself that you simply couldn’t have brought any less, that unlike most other travellers you are carrying camping equipment (handy excuse, this one) which takes up space, and that the South American climate is simply impossible to pack lightly for. But the reality is your pack is bulging at the seams and when you see those compact little sausages flitting by there’s no question about it, you’ve got a severe case of pack envy.

Travel tip: Make sure a trusted friend or family member knows where to locate your will and other valuable documents.  The same applies to spare keys and security codes. If you’re leaving the country, ensure you have adequate travel insurance. Check out www.glacier.co.za for all your financial planning needs before your next trip.

After quite a few months of travelling around Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, I had accumulated gifts and mementos on top of the usual travelling garb and my pack was bulging more than ever. But it was as we started the final leg of our trip, on a bus from Mendoza to Bariloche, that my pack-perving pastime was put to an unexpected end.

The chaos had already crept in before we even set foot on the bus. The over-organised receptionist at our hostel in Mendoza had called a taxi to take us to the terminal for our bus to Bariloche and we had ample time to get there. I’m uncertain as to the point at which the happy scenario deteriorated, but before we knew it, we were standing in the street with no sign of the taxi despite having called him twice, and faced with the question ‘Do we wait for the taxi and risk him not turning up, or do we walk as fast as our legs can carry us (and our bulging backpacks) and risk not getting to the bus on time?’

We made the snap decision to walk and arrived at the bus terminal 15 minutes later, nerves frayed, purple-faced and dripping with sweat, just before our bus pulled out of Bay 29.

Twenty-two hours later we were still thundering along with only two hours left of the journey. We were starting to see signs of the beautiful scenery that had lured us there in the first place and it had reached that stage of the trip whereupon you feel it’s safe to start making pronouncements on how the journey wasn’t half as unbearable as you had anticipated. And then the bus stopped.

We giraffe’d our necks out of our seats to see what was causing the diversion and before we knew it our beast of a bus had started reversing up the road. With this, several passengers and I trundled up the aisle to have a good peer out the back window and establish what was going on. To my great surprise what I saw when I looked out was not a potential passenger or a flat tyre, but rather a sad-looking bundle of luggage lying in the middle of the tar. I watched in shock and amusement as the bus conductor marched importantly over to it, picked it up, and revealed that it belonged to my boyfriend, Dave.

By this point, Dave had already made that connection and hotfooted it back down the aisle to the bus door to check if there was any damage. In about the same amount of time, various other passengers and I had made another connection and were pacing down the aisle with intent. If the luggage compartment had opened and one bag had fallen out, who knew how many had befallen the same sad fate in the kilometres before?

But the conductor assured us that this was the first and only piece of luggage to leave the bus, and swept us swiftly back to our seats. With nervous glances flying, we pulled back onto the road and continued the journey, the driver smiling again now that all that luggage nonsense had been pushed safely under the rug.

Needless to say, my response was somewhat less than graceful when I later presented my baggage reclaim ticket to the conductor and saw that my beautiful bulging backpack was nowhere to be found.

If it ever happens to you, and I can guarantee that all wanderlusters out there have had or are bound to have their fair share of this type of experience, here are a few things I learned in the process:

Let it go

Argentina is like Africa. How often does something get dropped in the road on any corner of this continent and have it politely returned to the owner on the tag? It was only after a few days and some phone heart-to-hearts with my Dad that I accepted the anorexic chance of my bag turning up and conceded to buying some new underwear and a toothbrush. In hindsight, my first day or two of dealings with the bus company would have felt a lot less traumatic had I accepted the fact and been the owner of clean teeth and a new set of clothes from the very beginning.

 

Take the path of least resistance

After three stressful days of to-ing and fro-ing to the bus terminal, phoning bus company head offices, and arguing in broken Spanish, I was pulling my hair out. Realising that the agonising process could actually ruin our last three weeks of travelling, I wisened up to reality and decided to cut my losses with the bus company. Getting them to compensate me for the lost baggage was going to be like renewing an ID document in South Africa – excruciatingly slow.

 

Fork out for travel insurance

I was only able to ditch the disastrous dealings with the bus company because I had taken out travel insurance. Once the insurance company had agreed to pay out for the full value of the lost items, I took to the streets of Bariloche with my bank card and replaced anything necessary for the rest of the trip. And despite being a terrible impulse-buyer, had quite a lot of fun doing it.

 

Pack less, and less than that

There’s a reason why they say ‘take the pile of things you were going to pack and halve it, and take the bundle of money you were going to take and double it’. You never know what might happen, and that’s the beauty of travelling.  When someone says ‘take less’, take less, and I can almost promise that the joy of having a smaller, more compact backpack will far outweigh that of having another clean T-shirt. And then of course, if it does disappear into the cosmos while you’re travelling some exotic destination, it’s no big deal.

 

The last three weeks of our trip were a pleasure. I replaced my backpack and some necessities, and had only a few possessions to worry about. We jumped on a bus to our next Patagonian destination and spoke very little about the backpack saga again. Most importantly, I finally had that compact, little backpack we had been coveting the whole trip. Pack-pervers eat your hearts out.

 

Image by Val Buzeta

 

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