6416 gram

My first experience with traveling only with hand luggage was last year. I was heading to the nepali Himalayas for a month, and I expected to have diverse climate throughout the trip on a scale between subtropical heat & humidity and the minus degrees at higher elevations. I had my superwarm sleeping bag, down jacket and trekking gear with me. My backpack weighed 8 kg without drinking water. And of course my pockets were full of every heavy stuff possible. Later, this year, we went for canyoning to Sardinia, and with the complete canyoning gear and heavy technical equipment we still managed to travel only with one small checked in bag. After all these tests I feel ready to leave for my 5 months long Asia-trip with only a small backpack.

The packing in pretty challenging, as I have no scale at home at all – no professional special luggage scale, but not even an old school bathroom scale. I’m pretty good at guessing grams and weight, but I’m not that good. So, what can I do, other than using my small kitchen scale, with small portions of my stuff. So, by now I know, that my sleeping bag weighs 1360g, my helmet is 290g, my flip flop is 250g. The method is ridiculous, but works well – no significant difference between my measurement and the one at the terminal.

So, let’s see the challenge itself. My long flight to Asia has the generous 8 kg limit, but as I plan to travel some in the region with AirAsia, a low-cost airline with cheap tickets, I have to adjust my backpack to their limits: 7 kg. And just to make it clear: my really lightweight backpack weighs 920g in itself and has the capacity of 30 liters!

I started to collect my travel gear in one of the sofas in my apartment and yesterday I had a dry run. Yes, I know, I know, but somehow it is so comforting to see, that all planned items fit in the bag. Some minor items are not in the sofa yet (of course I have a list for that!), but the first measuring is done: 6.416 gram. And I’m blocked here. I’m sure I missed something. Something that is really important and really heavy. It can’t work for the first try. That available 584 gram space is really suspicious.

Yeah, well, experience shows, that a last minute super-heavy whatnot (Thor’s hammer, a copper bell, the Wall Street Bull…) somehow crawls into my luggage. So, I allowed myself to have a moment of satisfaction and waited for the second round: the weight is OK, but does it fit into the backpack at all? Oh-so-yes, everything is in and did not even use my ultimate trick of rolling literally everything up to occupy less space.

Now I lay back and I still have some time to figure out what else to pack in to push my bag over the limit. Power bank 286g, world travel adapter 142g, notebook 155g… (just kidding.) (no.)