The 5 most overrated products for backpacking

backpacks in pickup truck

Let me tell you what not to pack when going on a backpacking trip. Packing your backpack for a trip is different for everybody. Some take weeks to plan and use lists to make sure they don’t forget anything. Others, like me, start the evening before. We all have one thing in common though: we over pack. Heavily too. To make matters worse, there are some travel items that everybody seems to be recommending while they are really not that great. Or even useful. You pack them, drag them around your whole trip and unpack them back home. Never really used them at all. So in a probably futile attempt to rid the world of these overrated and useless travel products, and to give myself a nice opportunity for a rant, here are the 5 most overrated travel items for backpacking.

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When I crashed a scooter in the Indonesian jungle

A huge hole in the unpaved road rocks me out of my seat onto my steering wheel. A slight wiggle, my foot slips, the scooter turns sideways, crash.

When you skid over the dirt-road sideways at high velocity with a scooter on top of you, time moves strangely slow. I remember thinking: ‘I am tearing up my skin and there is nothing I can do about it‘ – I was wearing short sleeves and no protection except for a helmet – as I skidded over an unlit dirt-road in the middle of the night in East-Lombok, Indonesia. 

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