How Not to Pack
Some lessons are learned the hard way, and for us, overpacking is one of them. It wasn’t an issue when we were based in Phuket for a whole month. However, once we started to be on the move, it was quickly clear that we couldn’t keep it up.
First off, when we started our trip, our bags were full - with just a tiny bit of leeway. Add in a few souvenirs (e.g. boxing gloves, “dreamcatchers”) and we suddenly found ourselves sitting on our luggages struggling for ten minutes at a time just to pack it all in. Not only that, we were way over the airline weight restrictions [1].
Although we had resigned ourselves to paying the extra bag fees for check-in luggage, the current situation was not sustainable. We were going to be on the move every couple days in Vietnam; the extra time and stress of packing would not be worth it.
So we decided to do what the Vietnamese do. Now, if you’ve ever seen Vietnamese people and their luggage, you know what I mean. We got a large cardboard box, filled it with our stuff, and shipped it home.
Yes, all this must go!
It was amazing how much extra stuff we had. Yes, a few items were acquired in Thailand, but the vast majority of what we packed was plain unnecessary.
Here are some of the biggest offenders:
A desk lamp (Cathy’s)
A 400-page hardcover book (Allen’s)
Game Boy Color (Cathy’s)
Nintendo Switch (Allen’s)
Clothes and shoes that were season-inappropriate, dry-clean only, or just plain uncomfortable (Cathy’s)
Padded boxing gloves (Allen’s)
Loose-leaf tea that, funny enough, we weren’t drinking on the go (Cathy’s)
An extra umbrella... yeah, we packed an extra “just in case” (Allen’s)
Somehow, we managed to fill a box with 14kg worth of stuff. That’s 31 pounds! And that’s after the post office lady told us to take out electronics to avoid a hold-up with customs.
Now here’s the kicker… It cost us $215 to ship the box. And you know what, it was worth every Vietnamese Dong (or 0.0043 US penny). We no longer needed to lug around all that literal dead weight. Even better was the mental relief; packing would be stress free, knowing that all our stuff would fit easily.
And it suddenly made sense to us why Vietnamese check in cardboard boxes as luggage [2]. It’s actually not luggage in the traditional sense, but really items meant to be shipped one way. And instead of actually shipping it from Vietnam and paying a ton, might as well check it in on a flight over.
Footnotes:
[1] Asian budget airlines sure know how to tack it on… that 7kg cabin bag limit is impossible.
[2] Must also acknowledge this is not a Vietnamese specific phenomenon. I’ve seen this with other people, but just from casual observation, I’ve seen this happen more with Vietnamese than any other people.
