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Learning the Tips and Tricks of Lightweight Packing From Shivangi Bajpai
How many of you here are travel enthusiasts? Well, if you are one, you’ll know how important it is to pack well for the trip. You should also understand that lightweight packing is crucial and helps a lot.
Yuktie Jhangiani, Kosha’s founder, recently had a chat with Shivangi Bajpai. The discussion was all about the importance of lightweight packing.
Shivangi Bajpai is the founder of Mix Mitti. Mix Mitti brings you sustainable cruelty-free bags.
They use fabrics that are good alternatives to leather. She’s also a wildlife photographer and a fashion graduate from NIFT. Apart from this, she’s an avid traveler as well. She was born in Kenya and has been to different parts of India.
This post is a summary of their discussion. If you wish to watch the entire interview, check it out here:
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Let’s see what we can learn from the knowledge shared in this interview. I’ll also elaborate on some points discussed in the chat.
Benefits of Lightweight Packing for Trips
Before we get into details of the conversation, let’s check out some major benefits of lightweight packing. Well, you and your luggage would benefit a lot from the same. So here are the perks of lightweight packing while travelling:
- You never have to worry at check-in.
- You are in complete control of your belongings.
- Your back doesn’t hurt.
- Your feet don’t hurt.
- It’s easier to pick out outfits since you have fewer choices.
- It’s easier to keep tabs on your belongings since you have fewer to manage.
- You can often keep your luggage with you on trains, buses, and planes.
- You can weave through foot traffic in busy areas with ease.
Travel Preferences
As you read, Shivangi is an avid traveller, and her travels happen pretty frequently throughout the year. As for her travel destinations, she prefers beaches and jungles more than mountains.
And while she’s on these trips, she follows a lightweight packing routine.
Shivangi: “I’m a very light-packing person. I’m usually pairing one pair of jeans with 2-3 different tops and then repeating them again.”
She likes to mix and match items from her clothing when she packs for her trips. Shivangi often carries one bag alone on her journey.
She believes that she’ll only take things she can carry with ease. Hence, she tries to accommodate as much as possible in the one bag she chooses to carry.
Yuktie also shares the basic modern-day luggage essentials for workaholics. It’s often one laptop bag along with a cabin bag and stroller.
Yuktie: “What two bags does is it restricts movement to a great extent.”
Yuktie shares examples to explain how heavyweight luggage can hamper your travel experience.
Heavy luggage won’t let you enjoy if you’re going to the mountains. Remember that you might have to carry your luggage all the way up the mountains. And, of course, that takes away the joy of travelling.
Heavyweight luggage can also affect your travels to places that aren’t accessible by car.
Due to these scenarios, you must be able to carry your bag around with ease. Hence, lightweight packing is very crucial while traveling.
Bajpai adds to this by sharing her hostel experience at NIFT. They would face a tough time having to drag their heavy luggage on the way back from vacations. Also, the conditions of the roads wouldn’t help their cause.
Lightweight Packing Tips and Experiences
Lightweight packing is crucial, especially when travelling to far-off destinations. In this regard, we could all learn from the methods, and procedures Shivangi follows on her trips.
“I pack in a way that I don’t have to check-in my luggage.”
Well, this speaks for itself.
Carrying enough for a check-in bag means your clothing options are limited immediately. But it also opens up possibilities to find more ways to wear the same pairs of clothes.
But there, too, Bajpai finds ways to make the most of her clothes. Even if it’s a long trip in terms of days, she tends to mix and match clothes from her luggage.
It’s a routine she has followed since she began her professional career seven years ago. After all, checking in luggage takes a lot of your precious time and energy.
Shivangi: “Organized packing really helps you to save space.”
She also talks about the time when she once travelled back to Kenya on a 15-day trip. Since it was the summer season there, she found it easy to pack clothes accordingly. But she also shares something interesting about her packing strategy for this trip.
She tried to press in and roll all the clothes into her bag. She did this to ensure they fit into the luggage perfectly instead of just throwing them into the bag. And guess what? She managed to pull off the 15-day trip with one bag alone.
So going by what Shivangi says, you must give lightweight packing a try.
Pic Credits: @alice_bajpai (Instagram)
If you’re an artist, remember that your gear needs enough space to fit in. So Shivangi suggests you compromise on the number of outfits you shop and pack.
After all, your gear is also precious. For example, a photographer would need to carry lenses, a tripod along with the obvious…camera.
Most often, you need to store your equipment in specific protective cases for its safety. So all you can do is pack fewer clothes and repeat them. Hence, pack clothing that will be enough to last the entirety of the trip.
Regarding suitable clothing, you must ensure that you’re covered appropriately for the weather conditions. To explain this, let’s learn from what Yuktie has to share about one of her trips to Norway.
It was the month of February when she landed in Norway, and the temperature range was -11 degrees. In such weather, she mentions how her luggage weighed under 7 kg. Yes, you read that right!
Even though it was seven kgs, it was sufficient for the trip. Here’s why that was so:
Let’s take an example of the base layers she carried along for the trip. The luggage included two sets of base layers. She would wear one set during the day and air dry it during nighttime. That’s also when she would be using the second set of base layers.
Since these base layers can double up as t-shirts, you wouldn’t need to worry about carrying another set of t-shirts separately.
So essentially, you should focus on the following three lightweight packing tips:
- Pack Suitable Clothing
- Roll Up Your Clothes to Let Them Fit in Well
- Pack Multifunctional Clothing
You could also benefit from the presence of a washing machine or laundromat in your area. It’s like a blessing in disguise. It allows you to pack sufficient clothes for three to four days. But you can always re-wear them after washing once they’re clean and dry.
During the discussion, Shivangi and Yuktie also highlight the importance of a medical kit. You’ll always need an appropriate medical kit, no matter where you travel. It must have essential medicines that protect you from an emergency health concern.
Shivangi also mentions how beyond a certain age, people must always carry a medical kit along with them. And if you’re of those who are injury-prone, Bajpai suggests that you carry bandages along with you.
While organizing your kit, the main points to remember are:
- It should be as compact as possible. Dark nylon wash kit bags are useful as they don’t attract attention and have lots of storage space.
- You must know what’s in the kit and how to use it. If you don’t know, then it will not be of much use.
- You should tailor the content according to your requirements. While figuring it out, you must consider the location and the intensity of your activities.
On a personal note, she also likes to carry hot water fermentation bags for her journeys to cold places.
If you’re travelling to remote places, it won’t be that easy to get hold of medicines if you need them.
Even if you’re living in hotels, please ensure that you carry your own medical kit. In many hotels, they don’t have official permission to supply medication to customers. So you would be at a loss if that’s the case.
Yuktie also adds to it by sharing a routine that she follows for a trip. Many of us might need some essential medication in the form of tablets to keep us healthy throughout. At such times, you may get tempted to carry the entire set of strips.
But since we’re talking about lightweight packing tips, Yuktie suggests you cut out the number of strips you think would be sufficient.
Well, that’s quite a good tip to follow. It’ll also allow you to save space and fit in possibly all medication together.
Things Shivangi Carries on Trips and Product Recommendations
As you’ve already read, Shivangi is very much a cabin bag person. So that’s one of the first things she carries for her travels. Next up, she also carries a passport wallet along with her. This passport wallet is a product from Mix Mitti itself.
This foldable passport cover eases your task of carrying documents while travelling. It has two sleeves that have space for A4-sized documents.
The documents could be your boarding passes, visa documents, or anything similar that you need while traveling. Along with that, it also has slots for your passport, cards, or something similar.
This wallet also has the option of a shoulder strap attached to it. So you could either hold it or free your hands by using it as a cross-body bag.
Mix Mitti’s cabin bags have something to offer all the workaholics too. They provide you with a separate laptop sleeve within the bag itself.
You must also try out their drawstring bags. They have a unique concept attached to it as well. The design includes interesting sketches of wildlife on them.
As far as Yukte is concerned, she prefers one consolidated bag that can carry around 45 litres during long trips. If it’s a shorter trip spanning around 3-4 days, a small backpack will do for the journey.
When it comes to shoes, Shivangi prefers to wear heavier shoes and pack lighter or thinner pairs.
On the other hand, Yuktie shares that it’s either two pairs of shoes or one. The latter would be a heavy pair she would wear throughout the trip. But along with that, you could also carry slippers or loafers if you need them while you’re indoors.
Apart from this, one of the viewers had something interesting to share. The viewer mentioned how a multipurpose tape came in handy while on a trip.
It was used to fix a bike. Shivangi added to that by mentioning how they were taught about a double-sided tape’s multifunctional abilities at NIFT.
Conclusion
Towards the end Yuktie shares some clothing suggestions for the mountains. She emphasizes packing lightweight clothing here too. You could do with a good set of thermals, jackets and beanies too.
As mentioned earlier, the thermals can double up as t-shirts. But Kosha’s jackets too have an interesting feature. If you aren’t wearing them, you could also use them as pillows.
Some jackets also have underarm vents which will come in handy when the temperatures warm up.
You can open the zippers and increase the jacket’s breathability. As for the beanies, Kosha also has some reversible beanies. One interesting benefit is the different colours you get when you literally reverse the beanie.
So I hope you’ve understood how lightweight packing can help while travelling. Well, you must try it out on one of your upcoming trips. You could follow the lightweight packing tips mentioned here.
Well, lightweight packing would also allow you to focus more on enjoying the trip rather than checking the luggage constantly. So it’s a win-win situation for you.
This post was written by Kosha team member – Shawn Mathias
