Sorry for the Group Email

I used to think my inner geek got a pretty good airing. I spent every month dibbling about with new cameras, phones and laptops at work, and every now and then my wife would brand me a nerd when I arrived home with enough cables to provide a Conservative MP with all the S&M they could eat.

It turns out, though, that if you want to really express that little part of you that loves the minutiae, you need to go on a world trip. Not only do you want to buy the latest and greatest gear, you have to buy it. Mongolia spends most of its winter at around the -30 degree mark, so as fabulous as I’m sure a puffer jacket from Top Shop would be, we spent our recent trip to the States making sure the employees of The North Face had a very happy Christmas indeed. Giant coats, thermal underwear, rain coats, trousers with more compartments than the engine room of the Titanic, the lot. We have sporks made from plastic and bowls made from silicone.

We drew the line at a pair of underwear with the tag line “six weeks, nine countries, one pair of underwear,” on the grounds that it was disgusting.

And then there’s the lovely technology. Chargers, cables, lenses, straps, batteries. The insurance nightmare isn’t worth thinking about.

We’ve tried out our mosquito nets too, which, in a semi-detached in the New Forest felt like nothing so much as setting up an indoors tree-house.

We made signs and everything.

The bad news, of course, is that it adds up horribly. By the time I’m in my boots and clicked into my bag, the whole ensemble weighs a shade over 20kg (about 40lbs for our American friends). There aren’t any twenty-mile hikes in the itinerary, but given the current fun and games in Guangzhou at the moment, you never know how long we might be wearing everything. Given that wearing the whole lot for ten minutes feels a lot more like twenty, it’s quite possible we’ll be auctioning off our things by Moscow.

Kit Links

FCO Travel advice The government gets hands-on with what to take.
www.nomadtravel.co.uk One of the UK’s best chains of travel gear sellers.
www.thenorthface.com Makers of fine, but expensive, outdoors gear. I’m not sure they sell anything that doesn’t stuff into itself, which means it’s not only great outdoors stuff, but it’s also metaphysical.
www.columbia.com More good outdoors stuff.

Dave has a bad back already. I have, however, got all seven Harry Potter books on my iPod, so I’m ready to recuperate on the trans-Siberian express. If you’ve been backpacking, for as little as a weekend or as long as a decade, I want to know what you carried. What did you use all the time, and what did you pack but never use? What did you wish you’d taken? Leave a comment below.