Backpacks Rule

I love backpacks. I’ve have 9 at the moment, and I still find myself eyeing new ones all the time. Yet, somehow there are haters out there. Gab Nancarrow at Travel Blog put up a post yesterday calling into question the supremacy of the backpack as the supreme container for backpacking – or indeed any travel – and I feel a need to defend my beloved satchels.  So 5 reasons backpacks are better than wheely bags:

1. Backpacks are all terrain. You’ll notice in the picture above I can’t even ride my POS rented bike on this back country trail in Senegal. How was I supposed to make it down the trail with a wheely bag? This isn’t just limited to back country. Stairs, curbs, and narrow passages are much easier when your bag is on your back.
2. Backpacks have many pockets and places to clip things. I’ve never seen a piece of luggage have the type of compartmentalization that backpacks offer. Not only can you stash your camera, book, water bottle, etc in a convenient pocket, but you can put the stash your laundry that got rained on in a different place from that sacred last clean pair of underwear. Also, you can tie or clip some of that wet laundry to the outside of your bag to let it dry.
3. Backpacks get smaller. Sometimes you’re in a place for a while and need to stash your backpack, or you have two backpacks, and you need to flatten one to be stored inside the other. No problem. Other luggage doesn’t do that.


4. You can take two backpacks. Have you ever tried to take two wheely bags through the airport? It sucks. They bump into everything, fall over, etc. but, as you can see in this picture, there I am with two backpacks on enjoying myself in the Ho Chi Minh City airport.
5. Backpacks are comfortable. I can’t count the number of times I’ve ridden in a packed car with my soft backpack in my lap, that would have sucked if my backpack and wheels and hard edges that dug into my legs. I’ve even used my backpack as a pillow in a pinch. Wheely bags just won’t do that for you.

I’m sure that there are situations where wheely bags are better, I’ve just never been in one. I took a backpack with wheels to Japan back when I was just learning how to travel, and I wore it as a backpack the whole time. Backpacks are just more utilitarian, and that’s what counts.

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Guess I’ll Have To Buy It

It looks like Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2009 is on sale now, and I’ll have to go pick myself up a copy since it’s an actual book and not an online publication.

The top 10 cities for 2009 is out today though, so who knows, maybe they’ll just release every bit of the book slowly to the press. The cities, via the Guardian, are:

1. Antwerp
2. Beirut
3. Chicago
4. Glasgow
5. Lisbon
6. Mexico City
7. Sao Paulo, Brazil
8. Shanghai
9. Warsaw
10. Zurich

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Lonely Planet’s ’09 Tips Coming Soon

Reuters and Times both have sneak peeks at Lonely Planet’s recommendations for 2009, and from the look of things, good ol’ LP is advising everyone to be a little more adventurous. My first thoughts for 2009 would be that things are going to be cheap in places flattened by the economic crisis, like Iceland. Or Beijing where it seems post Olympic bargains must abound. But these are both comparatively dull to what LP advises, and I give the stuff old tour book company points for that.

Here are their top 10 countries for 2009 from Reuters:

1. Algeria
2. Bangladesh
3. Canada
4. Georgia
5. Greenland
6. Kyrgyzstan
7. Oman
8. Peru
9. Rwanda
10. Sierra Leone

And the top 10 destinations from the Times:

1. Bay of Fires - Tasmania
2. Basque Country - France & Spain
3. Chiloe - Chile
4. Ko Tao - Thailand
5. Languedoc - France
6. Nam Ha - Laos
7. The Big Island - Hawaii
8. San Andres & Providencia - Colombia
9. Svalbard - Norway
10. Yunnan - China

There are some predictable classics on both lists, but seeing a country with ongoing conflict (Georgia), 3 African countries, and a high-mountain Southeast Asian jungle on the lists gets my mind racing on places I want to explore next year.

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Great Hikes

After dreaming about thru-hiking the AT or PCT this morning, I got to wondering if there were other epic trails like this elsewhere in the world. There are a collection of top 10, or 11, lists out there. Here are the best ones that I found, though in the end they each make me want to hike them all then write my own list.

iExplore (massively corporate site) has an interesting list of 10 best hikes, if only because it is one of the few top 10 lists that includes the AT or PCT. There first one on the iExplore list, the three week Annampurna Circuit (see map above), sounds like it deserves that number one spot, touring both through the wilderness of the mightiest mountains in the world, and the villages of the people who live amongst those mountains.

Best Hike’s list starts with the 47 mile long West Coast Trail in Canada. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that it’s a great hike, but can a 47 mile hike really be the best in the world? I guess they are shooting for average quality per footstep, rather than total experience though since #2 on the list is John Muir, which is just part of the PCT.

National Geographic’s best of list turns it up to 11. And they make that number 11 count by challenging you to follow in the footsteps of Earnest Shackleton and hike across South Georgia Island, where the average high in summer is a balmy 8C / 46F. This is my type of list, a little bit crazy, but you know that if you did them, you’d never be quite the same.

Photo from "Where Mountains Live" by Leo Le Bon

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