A 2017 Revival

The day before I left on a road trip last month I booked my hostel in Cape Town. When I arrived today they asked my name, scanned my passport, let me put my bags in storage, and said to come back at 3pm to check in. I went on a lovely aimless wander through town and returned to the desk. I wasn't on the list of people checking in today. The attendant poked through his computer and said I'd reserved in March, but the email they sent bounced and the number I registered isn't on WhatsApp[1]. I looked at the event I'd created in Google Calendar and saw I'd written "Check email or call to confirm." I'd assumed they were going to send an email during South African working hours, then promptly forgot about this TODO item during a week on the road. Oops.

Fortunately, traveling to Cape Town is more like my memories of Central America and not like modern Amsterdam, at least in shoulder season. I was able to find another hostel with an open room for a week just four blocks away. As expected, dragging my three heavy bags along the sidewalk was workable but not a lot of fun.

Speaking of my three heavy bags, before I bought my Turkish Airlines ticket I noticed their baggage page said carry-on bags are limited to 8kg. I'd never seen or heard of a carryon getting weighed, and it sounded like something a budget airline like Frontier or Spirit would do, not a flag carrier set on making Istanbul one of the busiest airports in the world. A quick Internet search found some Reddit threads with anecdata of cabin luggage not getting weighed, so I bought the ticket and mostly forgot about this limit. When I arrived at DEN (3 hours early, thankfully) the Star Alliance agent told me to weigh my carry-on first. Uh-oh. My clever packing plan had been to put my whole portable ham radio backpack in a wheelie bag, plus a change of underwear and some card games and small electronics in a big pocket. I knew this would be way more than 8kg because I'd tested the backpack radio kit on a short walk and it's heavy. (I have a lighter option, but I'm worried I'll need 45 watts to get my signal somewhere with enough hams to chase me for the magical 10 QSOs POTA target.) Fortunately there are luggage scales around the corner from the check-in counter, so I spent 45 minutes experimentally moving about 23 lbs from one suitcase to my two checked bags (each with about 5 lbs of spare weight) and my backpack, which has a width-expanding zipper. The next agent cheerfully weighed my exactly-8kg bag and checked my two exactly-50kg bags and handed me a baggage tag for my backpack without visually inspecting that it was clearly too big to fit under an airplane seat. As soon as I was out of eyesight I moved my camera bag, card games, and pockets full of granola bars back to the carry-on, knowing the gate agents have better things to do than weigh everyone's bags before they get on the plane.

I'm now going to be super aware of any objects I acquire on this trip. I'll obviously eat all the snacks, and gifting a lot of metal buttons will clear up some weight. But I'm also going to receive gifts, plus my AfrikaBurn shirt and hat. Hopefully my last lodging has a bathroom scale… or the CPT ticket agents are more chill.

8 kilograms is remarkably light for a carry-on. I was down to a mostly-empty backpack, a medical infejection pen, a folder with a dozen pieces of paper, and a fluffy pillow. I don't think I've ever had a bag this light on a plane, except my return trip from China when I put an erhu in a cardboard box in the bin. My empty suitcase probably weighs a kilo on its own. The rest of the flight experience was fine, but needing to leave a big void in my carry-on makes me not want to fly Turkish again. My lithium batteries aren't allowed in checked bags, so it makes no sense to require me to put them under the seat in a backpack while packing bulky light items like pillows in a hard-to-reach spot. Judging by the amount of space in the overhead bins they made a lot of money on extra bag fees, though perhaps they lost out on selling extra freight space.

[1] In much of the world, WhatsApp has largely replaced the open phone system because Wi-Fi and mobile data are cheaper than SMS, particularly internationally.

In a few hours I'll be on an airplane en route to Cape Town for AfrikaBurn, South Africa's regional Burning Man event. On the way back I'll be taking a couple weeks in Benelux so I can get in my Burning Man ranger training in Amsterdam and check out some old art and old crafts in the Low Countries. You can vicariously view my adventures in this shared photo album, and I'll try to post here a time or two.

My parents spent three months backpacking in Europe in 1972, and have been telling stories about the trip for over 50 years. Not only would they not be physically able to take that same trip now, many of the experiences they had are no longer available: 2020s Europe is a very different place than 1970s Europe.

As I've been preparing for this trip I've been recalling the trip Molly and I took to Guatemala and Honduras in 2009. Besides buying round-trip plane tickets and reading the Lonely Planet, we hadn't made any plans for our nine week trip. The first night we planned out a route with approximate times in each town. We'd get off the bus in a new place and walk to a LP-recommended hostel and say "Hi, we'd like a room for a few nights." Cell phones were abundant, but smartphones hadn't yet made much headway in Latin America, so everything was very face-to-face. Every week or so we'd check in at an Internet café or the shared computer in a hostel to check email and share a rambling travelogue with friends.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and travel planning is way more front-loaded. Every detail of a trip can be booked online in advance, though I've tried to only book things that I'll be very upset if I don't have, like lodging and tickets to key destinations. Today you can't just show up to the Rijksmuseum, buy a ticket, and check out the paintings. You need to book a specific time slot, several days in advance. If you're not feeling well, or it's a beautiful day and you'd rather go to the beach, too bad: you won't be able to go to the museum tomorrow. I had to put together a spreadsheet with two activities per day for two weeks in Benelux, two months in advance. I made sure to leave a couple open spots for spontaneity.

In 2009 Molly said "As long as you've got your passport and your toothbrush you're good to go." Smartphones have now become the other key travel item. Visiting a museum? Show the QR code on your phone. Need a taxi? Order an Uber on your phone. Buying food? Tap to pay on your phone. If my phone gets stolen, I'm not even sure I'll be able to find a desktop computer so I can organize a response. (This scenario is why I don't have two-factor on my GMail account: I want to go from "everything was stolen" to "I can send an email for help.") Molly and my late-20s travel instincts of carefully guarding a debit card and occasionally withdrawing cash at a secure bank ATM is going to feel awkward in Europe where websites keep telling me they don't even accept cash.

As I age, I also seem to acquire stuff that I need to carry around. In 2009 I brought a regular backpack and a hand bag of clothes; Molly just had a regular backpack. (I had a DSLR camera and socks, neither of which Molly brought.) When I packed my bags this week I discovered that my mental packing on the big suitcase was spot on, but it was way over the 50 pound limit. So now I'll be dragging three suitcases and a backpack over cobbled streets in old cities. One for camping and sleeping gear at AfrikaBurn, one for clothes and useful items, one for ham radio gear. The backpack's still got a DSLR, because even though smartphones have become our key digital items, travel photos with a proper camera body and lens just feel different.