When it comes to travel, you are what you carry, or – more tellingly – what you leave behind.
One of the great mysteries of a traveller’s life is why is it that the amount of luggage carried is in inverse proportion to the net worth of the traveller. The richest people travel with the least. The first-class queue is made up of passengers holding nothing more than a thin watch. Business, they’ll be holding one of those hybrid cabin bags with a telescopic handle and detachable computer satchel.
Tourist is made up of families and students shoving vast suitcases, like slaves building a Samsonite pyramid. The most chaotic baggage hall I ever arrived at was Islamabad. The carousel was a revolving jumble sale, taller than a man. The wait and the exhaustion, the sitting in the frozen dark to get halfway around the world, had made most of the luggage give up the effort at being functional – it split its zips, broke straps, popped locks and vomited, eviscerated its contents into the steamy Pakistani afternoon. There were cooking pots and packets of spices and baby milk. Slithering intestines of wire that went with collapsed cardboard boxes and cheap electronics. Hair rollers, Teasmades, music centres and microwaves. There were the disembowelled paper parcels of meat. A collection of bar stools. Bundles of bras and big knickers. Children’s nylon bedtime animals. All spinning past a crowd of shrieking, shoving Pakistanis who were finally home after journeys of tortuous inconvenience.
In the most basic markets in Africa, there is always a stall selling large plastic carrier bags. They come in either blue or green tartan and look as if they’re made of recycled twine. I work with a photographer who calls them refugee Vuitton. You see them in every airport in the world slumped in corners, lost and separated, often impounded for the 101 infractions that are put there to stop the poor from being poor anywhere but at home. These plastic cases more than anything else mark them out as the globe’s slowest, most hopeful and fearful journeyers.
The answer to the conundrum, ‘why do the rich have least and the poor most’, is that the rich travel with nothing because they own everything. The poor travel with everything because that’s all they own. The rich man gets what he needs at the other end. The poor leave nothing behind.
I obsess about luggage, about bags and rucksacks, money belts and secret pockets, steamer trunks and water-tight compartments, camping equipment. When my flight is delayed and I have to wait four hours, I while away the time designing luggage in my head. In fact, I often try to imagine my head as luggage and wonder if I can pack it any more efficiently and what I’d leave behind if it didn’t fit in the overhead locker. Did you really need to take detailed knowledge of a Peninsular war campaign and how to skin and joint a rabbit to Malaysia? And you only need one anecdote about prostitutes and diarrhoea.
I collect bags and smuggle them home. I have to hide them. Usually I hide them in other bags. I have an irrational fear of being separated from my bag in transit. I only carry hand luggage. Hand luggage is in an endless Darwinian war of attrition with people who man aeroplanes. It’s a fight between passengers who want to carry as much as possible and an airline who wants to put as much as possible in the lost luggage pile at Schiphol.
I travel with another photographer who is equally exacting about packing. Most photographers are, because their kit is so delicate, provocative and plainly valuable. Once on a long flight of excruciating boredom we were whiling away the hours doing shadow packing and he said you’ve got to think outside the box. What do you mean? Well, what is a suitcase but a box. Think outside it. Outside it? It’s laundry. Outside the box it’s dirty washing. No, he said. What would you call a case with arms and a belt? You’d call it a coat. How many coats are you allowed to take onboard? I don’t think there’s a limit on coats. Exactly. Instead of thinking about small cases, we should consider bigger pockets. I reckon I could pack everything I need into a purpose-built coat.
He had a point. But wouldn’t you mind being intimately and thoroughly searched by every customs officer in every flea-bitten airport we stop at? Because walking through customs wearing a lumpy duvet like the hunchback drug smuggler of Amsterdam may save you 20 minutes waiting by the carousel but it’ll add an hour whilst rough men examine your secret places with a Maglite. But it’s not a bad idea.
I have one bag that has been to pretty much every continent with me. It’s leather, about the size of two rugby balls. It has a zip and handle and nothing clever or designed inside it. One thing you want to avoid in cases are designated or pre-assigned pockets and flaps, compartments. Think of a bag like a body and the stuff in it like organs. They keep themselves in place. I could travel indefinitely out of this bag. It’s like Noah’s bag – I take two of everything. Two trousers, two shirts, two jackets, two pairs of shoes, two books. Usually I’m going to countries that are hotter than London. Most places are. And I can wash as I go.
I like everything to be the same. Identical shirts and trousers and T-shirts. Every foreign correspondent I know is in a constant search for the perfect travelling kit. Exactly the right pair of trousers, the best shirt. Paring down and adding up the multiples of use. We travel with Tabasco and chewing gum and short-wave radios, Moleskine notebook, space pen. Silk sleeping-bag liners – essential for cheap hotels. A small light that will attach to your head, a stash of dollars. The interesting things are the small comforts that correspondents take. Comforts can become incredibly important. I once travelled with a guy who’d eat one jelly bean every night at 10 o’clock. He’d just put it in his mouth and sit very still until it dissolved. Personally I can’t travel with pictures of my family – they make me homesick and worried. But I always take a tiny goosedown pillow, which squeezes into nothing.
And one of my books will always be Herodotus, the father of history and travel writing. The collection of observation, prejudice, analysis, lies, supposition and brilliant colourful narrative, it has in it the essence and joy of discovery. And although we’re separated by two-and-a-half millennia he reminds me of the purpose and the excitement of travel. I also wonder what he travelled with. What did Ancient Greek suitcases look like? You never see them on the pottery or in the sculptures. They’re never standing there with suitcases or big packets of stuff tied up with baler twine. There’s never a man with a rucksack. The Trojan War happened without suitcases.