Packing cubes, shoe bags, gadgets – you’re making travel too complicated

What about packing cubes?! You haven’t even mentioned packing cubes!

This was the response a few weeks ago when I posted a video on my Instagram account of me packing a suitcase before a trip to Europe. The idea of the clip was to demonstrate my packing technique – rolling instead of folding, obviously – to show just how much you can fit into a suitcase when you make all your clothes into tightly bound sausages.

But the responses I got were surprising – namely, the obsession with packing cubes, and the horror that I wasn’t using any. There was disgust, too, that I wasn’t putting my shoes in individual plastic bags, but rather just letting parts of my clothes rub up against the apparently gross things that had been on my feet.

All of which made me think: guys, you’re doing this all wrong. You’re trying too hard. You’re making travel too complicated.

There’s an interesting thing that happens when you start travelling a lot. Rather than amass more stuff, more gadgets and handy little things, you take fewer items. You figure out what’s really essential and you ditch the rest.

So no, I don’t have packing cubes, and I also don’t have special bags for each shoe. I don’t use neck pillows, I don’t have expensive camera equipment, I don’t take a microfibre towel, I don’t have a money belt, I don’t take carabiners or special soaps or even a proper toiletries bag (a plastic Ziploc bag packs down smaller and still carries everything I need – though I acknowledge that as a bald man with a limited skincare regimen, I need far fewer toiletries than some).

“You need this, this will make your life easier, this is the new gadget everyone is using. Buy, buy, buy.”

I understand the desire to buy more stuff. It feels like the more you have, the easier and more efficient travel will be.

That’s due in large part to the great weight of capitalism bearing down upon you. You need this, this will make your life easier, this is the new gadget everyone is using. Buy, buy, buy.

And anyway, you’re about to go on the trip of a lifetime – obviously you’re going to invest in the best stuff. So you buy all the packing cubes and the other various bags for handy storage, you purchase the gadgets, you kit yourself out with everything the targeted social media ads have suddenly started telling you that you need.

I could be an outlier with the packing cubes, even among frequent travellers. I can acknowledge that.

Some people find them a very useful way to organise all their stuff: underwear and sleep gear in this cube, T-shirts and casualwear in this one, jumpers and winter gear in this one, dirty clothes go in here.

But I’ve just never needed them. I know what’s dirty and what’s clean without special bags. I don’t carry enough to lose certain items in the morass. And I’m not so obsessed with cleanliness that I think my clean clothes are going to become terribly sullied by sharing space with things I’ve already worn (you’re looking at a reformed backpacker who would get many, many wears out of all sorts of items of clothing).

And the individual shoe bags? Guys, just how dirty are your shoes getting? Are you slopping around Glastonbury on every holiday? Are you sloshing through rivers on safari?

I’m usually just wandering around cities and sometimes a little countryside, in the same way I do back home.

So when I pack my shoes I place them on their sides in the suitcase, with the soles (the only possibly dirty part) resting against the edges of the case. The only bits that come into contact with the rest of my clothes are the shoe’s uppers, which I’m pretty comfortable with because like I said, they’re just not that dirty.

I’ve talked about neck pillows and camera equipment before. One doesn’t work for me, the other weighs a lot and doesn’t get used often enough.

I used to carry a Turkish towel with me – a little like a sarong – but always found it did a terrible job of actually getting me dry, so now I just use one from the hotel (’cause I’m fancy and I stay at hotels).

Money belts are awkward and obvious and just scream ‘Hey, this guy has something to steal, and it’s all around his waist or dangling around his neck’. Twenty years without one and I’ve never regretted it.

Carabiners, travel soaps, pocket knives, branded travelwear, fancy toiletries bags, special bags for tech stuff, portable fans, plane-friendly moisturisers, special covers to put over your tray table on planes – all of this and much of the above, to me, is just stuff that’s been designed and marketed to sell you more things.

You can get by just fine without it. Even the packing cubes.