Greetings from Saigon, Vietnam, our home for the next few (and the past few) days due to Visa extension issues. We initially tried to extend the Visa ourselves, which unfortunately failed after a day of jumping through hoops. Our cheap and fast Vietnamese hookup in Dalat had issues as well. Now, our Visa is getting extended by someone here in Saigon, but it’s taking 5 business days and costing a bit more than we had hoped. But nonetheless we should have no issues leaving Vietnam and hopefully on Saturday we’ll add another stamp in our passports as we head to Phnom Penh, Cambodia by bus!

From time-to-time, Sharon and I will be sharing some of the travel tips we’ve learned. Our first “tips post” discusses the science of packing our backpack.

A concern we had about traveling for an extended period of time was becoming annoyed with “living out of our backpacks”. I’m happy to report back that with some extensive trial-and-error, this is no longer much of a nuisance.

The key to the way we pack is that everything goes in a bag before going into our backpack. Essentially, nothing in my backpack is just stuffed into the pack by itself. Stuffing individual items leads to disorganization, inefficient use of space, and takes much longer to pack and unpack.

The best packing accessory we purchased were ITW’s Space Compressible Travel Roll Bags. They’re essentially large see-through compression “Ziploc” bags. They’re cheap and awesome! All of my clothes now fit into one large and one small bag – pants, shirts and jacket in the big bag and underwear and socks in the small bag. To use them, you roll-up the bag and while you do so, air is released from the bag out of the bottom, creating an air-tight bundle of clothing – it saves a ton of space. It also makes unpacking all of my clothes easy; I simply pull out two bags.

Another great packing accessory purchase was the Eagle Creek Pack-It Stuffer set. The largest one is a perfect place to store laundry and the other two I use to store some random smaller things – locks for our laptops, my snorkel gear, etc.

Sharon’s favorite purchase was Eagle Creek’s Koala Hanging Toiletry Kit. I bought a small, basic toiletry bag which works just fine, but I must admit, I do get jealous when Sharon just hangs up her toiletry bag in the bathroom.  It’s pretty darn convenient.

Not all of my packing related purchases worked out well.  Here are a couple of items I regretted packing and ended up shipping back to the states:

• Eagle Creek Travel Gear Pack-It Folder – I think this would be a great accessory if you were traveling with a regular suitcase for a week of business meetings where you needed each shirt to be crisp. For backpacking though, it was bulky and frankly a burden to fold my t-shirts and 1 collared shirt each time.
• Eagle Creek 2-Sided Packing Cube – I had the great idea to use this to store my workout clothes, underwear and socks, which it did just fine. But similarly to the Pack-It folder, it’s pretty bulky and didn’t fit nicely into my pack. Space is at a premium and unfortunately I didn’t think the cube saved space. It does make organization easier though.

In all, including my toiletry bag, I have 10 bags which go into my backpack- three of which rarely leave my bag. So, packing and unpacking essentially involves 7 bags. When they’re out of my bag, they feel like drawers-I can open, close and put them away. Most of them are see-through or are a different color so it’s easy to tell what’s inside.

If you have any packing tips you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them. We’re constantly striving to make it an easier process.

Note: All links above are Amazon affiliate links. If you like something we mentioned, we’d appreciate your support of using these links to purchase-we’ll get a small cut. Every little bit helps us keep our travel dreams going! Thanks

Filed under: Travel Tips | Travel: Vietnam