A Stone's Throw: May 2014

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Why A Backpack And Not My Louis V Suitcase?

(This post was inspired by an argument with a friend who is going abroad for several months and wanted to take a suitcase. We had a pretty vehement argument, which for her sake I hope I won.)

Look, what you carry your stuff in while you're on the road is largely personal preference. There is some logic to it though, however. Personally, I prefer a large internal frame backpack for several reasons:

- It fits a ton of stuff
- its convenient to move if you end up having to walk a ways
- it can be loaded up to do a trek of hike if you need to
-it comes with a rain cover
-it blends in to the travel culture.

The first time I went abroad, a bright green dufflebag was the luggage of choice for me. It did everything luggage was supposed to do. It got my clothes from point A to point B, all in one parcel. It worked because I was doing a fairly limited trip, and staying with friends, but I wanted to get something more convenient.

For my next international trip, I went with a large internal frame pack I found on Amazon for under $100. These things can get really expensive really quick, but investing in a good pack can land you with a solid piece of equipment for a decade or so. Some of the really popular, high quality brands you might see out on the trail are: Karrimor (UK), NorthFace (US), Quechua (French Canadian), Osprey (US), First Ascent (South Africa).

I used a Teton 85 liter pack, which certainly wasn't the same quality as those high end packs I mentioned above, but did the job just fine for me and it was CHEAP. In retrospect however, I probably would have dished out more for a brand with a little more staying power (my pack now sports a couple of broken straps after 9 months of hard use). I wanted a pack so large so that I could fit my sleeping bag and 1 man tent in it as well as my stuff, and as long as you're willing to carry it, get as big of a pack as you want!

Suitcases are great if you are going to one place for a week or so, and won't be using public transportation or the like with it. If you plan on moving around a fair bit then a suitcase can be a nightmare (trust me, having wandered the streets of Paris with both a backpack and a suitcase in the rain, I've been there). For me, backpacks offer versatility, which is incredibly valuable when you are on the road and not sure what you're gonna be getting into all the time. I will honestly probably never use a suitcase again in my life.

There is an entire culture of people living out of backpacks, traveling the world. Its the carrier of goods for a reason, trust me on this!

Here are some links to different companies that sell packs, as well as the one I used personally on my trip:

http://www.karrimor.com/rucksacks

http://www.firstascent.co.za/product-category/equipment/packs-bags/

http://www.decathlon.co.uk/C-541338-hiking-backpack

http://www.thenorthface.com/catalog/sc-gear/equipment-technical-packs

http://www.moosejaw.com/moosejaw/shop/search_Osprey____?ad_id=Google&cm_mmc=PPC-_-Google-_-Osprey_Osprey+Pack-_-osprey+packs_Exact_38214777763&cm_guid=1-_-100000000000000198309-_-38214777763&kcid=59f6edb7-55df-1a49-1363-0000656880e2&utm_medium=PPC&utm_source=GOOGLE&utm_campaign=Osprey&utm_term=osprey-packs_Exact&gclid=CNWO4NW-rr4CFZRcfgodkFgAZA

http://www.amazon.com/TETON-Sports-Fox5200-Internal-Backpack/dp/B000F38YIM/ref=sr_1_4/188-8429310-9870338?s=sporting-goods&ie=UTF8&qid=1400176051&sr=1-4&keywords=teton+backpacks

Friday, May 9, 2014

Oudtshoorn: Crawling Through The Cango Caves

The view of the Indian Ocean from our room in the hostel.... Backpacking can be a hard life man!

Go crawl through some giant, half explored caves.
Ride an ostrich.
Play with baby cheetahs and leopards.
Dive with crocodiles.

My to-do list for the day read off like a Christmas letter praying to the most generous Santa ever for "awesomeness" incarnate under the tree. Granted, it also might have been a wee bit ambitious to think I could have squeezed it all into one day.

After our adventures along the coast in Tsitsikama, Tracie and I headed along the coast towards Wilderness. This quaint little beach town welcomed us with open arms and a torrent of rain, as we miserably ducked inside our hostel more soaked than we had hoped. This was no night for camping, so we bit the bullet and paid for two beds.

That night I did my research and came up with the aforementioned laundry-list of dreams to tick off my list the next day. Oudtshoorn, a dusty little Afrikaans-speaking town about an hour from the coast, had some really great attractions. Like most things I plan, it didn't go quite the way I had mapped it out in my head...

We got a late start after agreeing to give a couple fellow backpackers a lift out there with us (one was an Australian who had seen a man next to him eaten by a bull shark while swimming only a few days earlier... needless to say he could have used a pick-me-up!), and after dropping them off in town for a festival, Tracie and I finally made it to the caves (albeit, just in time to wait for another half hour for the actual tour to start).

Our tour finally started and we were just absolutely floored by these beautiful caves! They were huge and so beautiful, it was like being inside a dripped wax sculpture the size of a cathedral. The caves led through twisting passageways, up sheer faces and through tiny crevasses barely large enough for a person to fit through. The air was hot and muggy, and got worse the deeper went. Not at all a place for those with even mild claustrophobia.

Our 90 minute tour ended up lasting over 2.5 hours thanks to some slow moving tourists who got stuck in a tight spot called, "The Postbox." So by the time we crawled out of the caves, hot and sweaty, we were WAY over the time we had scheduled for the caves and it was pretty obvious that ostrich riding was out of the picture for the day, much less attempting to play with cheetah cubs!

So, Tracie and I hopped in our car and zipped back into town to enjoy the festival. We picked up some Kudu sausage and strolled through the quaint little town munching on greasy game meat until we met up with our friends whom we had dropped of, at the beer garden just as the sun began its last descent.

It had been a long day, and even though I was a little devastated that my plans hadn't all worked out, we all decided to head back to our hostel on the coast for the night. There's always tomorrow to go riding giant pre-historic looking birds and play with jungle cats!