Diana Balham: Packing more in

Illustration / NZ Herald

Opinion

There's a plethora of tips out there to make travelling easier, writes Diana Balham.

I saw a post online the other day called 40 Genius Travel Tips That Will Change Your Life Forever. And it was genius. What fiendishly clever brain came up with using a pill organiser for taming tangly jewellery, a bulldog clip to protect your razor head or a shower cap over your shoes to keep your luggage clean?

Some of them are a bit niche: not everyone wears hairclips and so won't be needing to cart them about in a Tic Tac container. And some are just bonkers: using straws to carry tiny amounts of skincare products, which you somehow seal then label with little bits of tape. So then you'd need a pair of scissors or a knife to cut the ends off the straws, which would mean packing said sharp objects in your luggage, which would get confiscated by the authorities if you didn't check them in.

And that's starting to sound like a verse from There's a Hole in My Bucket. "With what shall I cut it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry? ..." (Why not just save the little bottles from hotel bathrooms, or is that too obvious?)

But, disconcertingly, an awful lot of these tips relate to travelling laden down with electronic gadgets.

It's no wonder we're being urged to vacuum-seal our clothes before packing them. That way we can cram in more laptops, smartphones, iPads, chargers, cables, headphones and multi-plug power outlets. Remember when the closest thing we got to packing something electronic was an adapter plug for countries that didn't use our system?

In the olden days (before the internet), going on your OE really did mean cutting the apron strings from Mum and Dad. The only one-to-one contact was stratospherically expensive toll calls from the other side of the world. There were no blogs, no Facebook updates, no texts or emails. Without the wonders of Skype, we could go for years without seeing what our family and friends looked like these days. We'd set off with big, trashy novels for the plane trip, wallets full of travellers' cheques and those wonderful old red-and-black checked Swanndris to keep us toasty and show the world we were Kiwis.

Now that the poorest goatherd in Kyrgyzstan can take selfies of himself and the kids, there is no such thing as being out of touch. Never again will an anxious parent have to contact Interpol to find out if the youngster has been spirited away by people-smugglers or just can't be arsed sending a letter. Seemed like more of an adventure somehow.

Today, we can bother our nearest and dearest day and night with a never-ending stream of chatter and photos.

No restaurant meal is too unimportant to live forever on Facebook. And we can always use another shot of someone pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, can't we?

So, with the noble aim of enabling the constant chronicling of our time away, here are top tips for the electronically minded: keep loose chargers and cables in a glasses case. Use a spring from a biro to stop chargers from bending. If you forget your wall plug, charge devices using the USB slot on a TV. Stop your headphones from tangling by winding them around our old friend the bulldog clip. Get a free cellphone charger by asking at the hotel front desk, where they will probably have a box full of orphaned devices. Take a multi-plug power board and "be the airport hero". That's all it takes these days. You no longer need to land a malfunctioning plane. Just whip out your electric thingie and you're a knight with a white charger.