How I started traveling light

Traveling light started in different phases of my life.

I was a financial auditor working for a consultancy company and I used to travel for work. Our teams went several times to Africa, particularly to Angola and to Guinea-Bissau.

 

In one of my trips to Angola, I watched, first had, a friend of mine waiting a couple of hours for his bag to be taken out of the aircraft and put it into the conveyor belt at the airport.

He was happy for a while, but eventually saw that all of the team had their bags with them but he didn't. The happiness quickly disappeared.

I had to lend him some of my clothes and saw how affected he was just because he had to go to work without having his things with him. Minor things were getting to him, like not being able to shave or having to wear the same clothes every day.

Because of this event I started to travel with a small 10 liter backpack with me at all times with some essentials, like a change of clothes mobile phone charger and my laptop. All the remaining clothes I just put them into my main bag and sent it to the aircraft cargo hold.

I traveled like this for a while, but then, one day I decided to go to Japan for a tourism. I had wanted to go there for a while and this was an excellent opportunity.

However, my friend's experience was still in my mind. I didn't want to go to Japan and risk having my bag lost.

So, I started googling to understand what I could do to reduce this risks.

The answer? If I traveled light I could bring my bag with me in the aircraft and I would not lose site of it nor would I risk having it lost.

 However, to do so, I needed to travel with only a cabin-approved carry-on bag for 15 days!

On top of this, at the time, I avoided washing my clothes during my trips, so how would I be able to fit everything inside my bag?

There was one website that completely changed my approach, which was onebag.com.

This website advocates that we should travel with one bag only and so I did.

It wasn't as simple as deciding to go with just one bag. I needed to think how I was going to take that many clothes in such a small bag.

In the end I did overcome the challenge by thinking carefully how many outfits I was going to wear during my trip, and how many shoes and toiletries I was going to need.

Still, it wasn't enough.

ok, I was overpacking a little back then... meanwhile I did learn how to be more efficient and pack less things (check my posts on How to travel only with a 20 liter backpack for any number of days and How to travel only with one carry-on bag)

 So the method of packing stuff into my bag became crucial.

I discovered that if I rolled all my clothes, my packing efficiency increased significantly and I would be able to pack 15-days worth of clothing inside of just my one bag, not do laundry and still have space left for souvenirs.

I was so amazed by this, that I decided to do my own videos on how to roll clothes to be packed for travel.

I overpacked for my trip to Japan, like I said, but not by much.

 

After this trip I started thinking on how I could even be more efficient and that is when I decided to start doing laundry.

I decided I didn't want to mix dirty clothes with clean clothes, so the best way to avoid this was to wash my dirty clothes everyday or every other day. This way, I could keep only clean clothes inside my bag.

As soon as the decision of doing laundry was done, my traveling light freedom started. Now, I only travel with a 20 liter backpack and that is enough for all my tourist needs.

 

It was a long way and it did take me a while to perfect my system (which has not stopped evolving - I'm always fine tuning) but I did come to a point where I do not feel encumbered with a lot of luggage or with my bag's weights. They simply do not weight enough for me to feel backpain.

Traveling light has been a success to me and I'm really happy I got to this point where I just want to take the essentials.