I travel all year round for work, typically 2 to 3 days trips. Packing for such trips is easy. Packing for vacation is another ball game all together. I would get all worked up as it involves outfits for many different occasions. On this trip I need to prepare for summer days of above 30 degrees in Buenos Aires and also single digit temperature in Patagonia. To further complicate things, we need to pack for cosmopolitan city socializing and also be ready for hiking the rugged terrain, all within 15kg checked-in luggage limitation imposed by the domestic flight operator.
Tasks completed so far:
- Downloaded a translation app. I am testing iTranslate and Voice Translator now. The latter seems to be more accurate on a test of five Spanish words.
- Signed up a data plan for South America. Will be collecting the wifi router from “台灣之星” at the airport.
- Set up Google Trips app to keep all my flight and hotel reservations in one place
Most important stuff on the packing list is obviously the iPhone; decided to go light with just an iPhone and accessories. Not forgetting the power banks. For video and photography, I packed the following:
- Wewow lightweight stabilizer
- Olloclip lens (fish eye, super wide and macro) for iPhone
- Shure MV88 iPhone microphone for sound capture
To make sure I will not be glued to the phone the whole time, I brought a book, Collection of Fictions of Jorge Borges. This is my ritual to read something relating to the country I am visiting. I read Coetzee while traveling in South Africa and Neruda in Chile. This time it was a toss between Bruce Chatwin on Patagonia or Borges’ collection of stories.
A spontaneous journey through the wilderness of one’s choosing in an effort to satisfy one’s itchy feet, a need to be elsewhere, the craving for the open road, that space over the horizon… you can’t quite touch it so you have to go find it because you just know it’s there…Or maybe it just feels good to go walking around. This is the description given by Crocodile Dundee.