On the road

An interesting question came up recently in one of the forums I frequent online: what gear do you take with you on the road? I thought about this again a couple of weeks ago as I packed my bags for a week in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where I had been invited to speak at two literary festivals.

Travel has been one of the great boons of being a writer, and I hardly ever say no to a chance to go up in the air and then to touch down in some place where the food, the English, and the cellular networks are all different. I get tired by all this traveling — and more easily the older I get — but I never really tire of it, seeing each journey as a ticket to knowledge, in the very least to more material for all those unwritten novels.

Some years are busier than others, but the day invariably comes when I have to pack my bags for another road trip to another city.

For trips of more than a couple of nights, I bring two bags. One is a big, black, many-pocketed, virtually indestructible Tumi that was the gift of a friend, and which has now slogged through dozens of carousels. That bag carries the usual stuff: clothes, shoes, toiletries, books, and the cups of ramen and tins of sardines that are my most faithful companions, especially to places ruled by cheese and curry.

Into a front pocket of this Tumi goes another drawstring bag containing a small warehouse of electronic thingies: a yellow extension cord (yellow so it’s easy to see and not leave behind in some hotel room), chargers for the camera, laptop, cell phone, and iPod, a USB cable, and cables and adapters of all kinds.

It’s the carry-on backpack that carries the essentials and the fun stuff. The MacBook Air — easily the most delightful and useful piece of computing hardware I’ve ever owned — goes into the padded rear compartment.

Into the main compartment goes the camera — either the DSLR or the point-and-shoot, depending on the trip’s photographic possibilities and on how much weight I feel like lugging. Then I’ll throw in a book — very likely nonfiction, as anything else makes me dizzy on the road. (This last time around it was One of a Kind, about the rise and fall of Stu Ungar, probably the greatest card player who ever lived.)

The front pouch carries the little things: 

• An early iPod shuffle, which has the 250 songs I’ve decided are all I really want to listen to;

• Two pairs of glasses—shades and spare bifocals — either one of which can provide an answer to the question I keep yelling at Beng (“Where did I put my glasses?”);

• A USB SD card reader-cum-thumb drive for transferring pictures, which — at P50 from CDR-King — is the most cost-efficient digital accessory I know;

• A Moleskine notebook, now on its second year of jerky scrawls and water stains;

• A Parker rollerball, for immigration forms, and one of my vintage fountain pens, just to hold and to look at when I need to feel good; and

• A wad of business cards for the inevitable exchanges, especially around Asia;

Into the side pouch goes a small folding umbrella, less to be foppish than to protect valuable electronics against a downpour.

I should add that I also always carry one of those needle-and-thread sets they give away in hotels, for the occasional wardrobe malfunction. I’m pretty good at sewing and pressing — skills learned from years of enforced bachelorhood in graduate school — and can hem pants should I ever need to.

One more thing that goes into the backpack is a pair of chopsticks — at least until the TSA disallows them as lethal weapons. I can disappear for days in my hotel room with a stash of ramen, Wi-Fi, and the Discovery Channel, and chopsticks rule in that domain.

Let’s not forget the Snickers bar and the M&M peanuts that I need for those bursts of energy in the midst of walking or shopping (or, more likely, trailing after Beng). I’m not much of a desserts or pastries person, but I do crave chocolates and nuts, and no trip would be complete without reserves of these in my backpack, coming and going.

Speaking of travel gear, I’d like to recommend two software programs that have proved extremely useful to me for many years now.

One of them goes all the way back to 1999, from the days of the Palm Pilot, when I had to navigate the Tube in London over the many months of our stay there.

That’s a program called Metro — available for all kinds of devices and OSes—that plots routes across all the world’s major subway and metro rail networks. You input the stations where you’re getting on and getting off, hit a button, and get a readout of your route plus all the stops in between and the estimated time.

The second program I use a lot is WorldMate, which gives you local times, weather reports, currency rates, and other travel information. If you email WorldMate your flight details, it will embed these into your calendar and remind you of your imminent departure.

And the best thing about both programs is that they’re absolutely free. Google and download them into your smartphone or PDA, and ease the pains of being on the road.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.