The most useful travel hacks often involve ingenious ways to deal with technology while on the road. Other hacks involve clever laundry tricks, or recreating the comfort of familiar things like hot coffee. If you always stay in upscale hotels, you won’t need many travel hacks, because usually everything has already been planned by the hotel designer– for requisite standards of comfort away from home. Traveling in less luxurious conditions obviously will necessitate more problem-solving. Still, you might need to dry your bra at the Four Seasons!
Laundry
Let’s start with laundry, and staying relatively clean enough to be accepted by your fellow travelers. I travel with just one small suitcase, so the items I bring need washing out fairly often. At home, we are so used to the ease of our own washers and dryers that we have to be ingenious when traveling.
Ask if laundry is done by hand or in a machine.
On the road, keeping your clothes clean is a choice between DIY or laundry service, with the limitations noted below… Occasionally hotels forbid you to wash your clothes in the bathroom sink; these places have laundry service that they want you to use. (Despite the ban, I’ve never been reprimanded for carefully washing my underwear; hotel managers are mostly concerned about water splashed all over and dripping clothes on the balcony.)
If you are not staying somewhere with laundry service, and you don’t want to wash your jeans in a tiny basin and wait a day or two for them to dry, ask around – at the hotel desk is a good place to start. Often there is someone in the hotel itself, or in the town who is ready to earn money by washing clothes; remember that honest work is respected.
Hotels with laundry service usually provide a cloth or plastic bag for your dirty clothes. Be sure to tick off your items on the Laundry List that is usually near the laundry bag, to be sure you get them all back. I’ve found that if clothes are missing from your clean clothes stack, it’s rarely a theft, but a mix-up and your items are in another traveler’s pile.
But laundry service can be expensive. Check prices before you hand it in. Sometimes washing is priced by the piece and sometimes just by the weight of the whole bag.
Before turning in your dirty clothes, you need to ask if they will be washed in a machine. In modern countries or upscale hotels, they’ll probably use a washing machine. If so, that’s great, go ahead and use the service. But in a little riad in Morocco or a small hotel in an Indian village, you can be sure that laundry is done by hand, which brings us to….
Underpants!
Unless you are staying in fairly modern hotels, your clothes will likely be sloshed around in a bucket on the roof. That is fine for everything but women’s undies! In most of the world, it is considered insulting to have to wash a stranger’s underpants. I wouldn’t want to do it.
So unless you have asked, and are positive that clothes will be washed in a machine, you need to do it yourself, even if your hotel tells you not to wash clothes in the basin. Men’s boxers and briefs seem to have different rules and they are OK to throw in the laundry bag with shirts and pants.
To wash your undies, you may need to cram a plastic bag in the basin’s drain if there is no plug. (Or wash a pair while you take a shower.) Liquid soap is good but shampoo or bar soap work just fine. I travel with a baggie of 4-5 little squishy Tide Pods or a baggie of powdered detergent for washing clothes. Wash and rinse undies. then wrap them in a clean towel and twist it hard, or put the towel-wrapped underwear on a clean bathmat and step on it with bare feet to get most of the water out. Find some ingenious way to hang them to dry inside your room.
Some organized travelers bring a flat universal drain plug and an elastic clothesline which won’t hold the weight of a lot of wet clothes, but can be useful if you can find two hooks to stretch it between.
And either don’t bring expensive outdoor gear, or else wash it yourself. One person’s favorite UV-protection, mosquito-proof travel shirt came back from the laundry melted, because workers took pride in neatly ironing it… (A good general rule is not to travel with anything so precious that its destruction or loss would be devastating.)
Always dry clothes in your room or on the roof on a designated clothesline.
NEVER hang any drying clothes outside your room, on a balcony or planter or railing. That is the height of Ugly Traveler Syndrome. In humid Cuba, I dried clothes by carefully hooking hangers on the central lamp, in line with the air conditioner fan. I have also draped clean, damp undies over warm TVs or warm DVD players in hotel rooms. Look around your hotel room and see what interesting and ingenious combinations of laundry techniques you can dream up!
Try some of these tips on your next adventure
Humid places like Thailand or Bali require extra clever plans to get your clothes completely dry. Outdoors in full sunshine is always best if the weather is good. But in a humid climate, you need to dry your clothes fast, so they don’t stay damp and smell musty. In the muggy Peruvian Amazon, I washed out a bra then did a speed-dry by hooking it around a whirling fan; top photo.
In Guatemala, I dried socks on a rainy day by pulling them over two full water bottles rigged up with the hair dryer on the bathroom counter. To accomplish this, stick the handle of the hair dryer into a ceramic mug, nicely provided by your hotel; just ask. Turn the dryer on to LOW and place the sock-covered bottles 6 – 8 inches away. Stick around to rotate the bottles every few minutes; make sure you don’t burn the socks or melt the bottles.
Technology
I travel with a Mac Air laptop and I swear the charger and cord weigh as much as the laptop. When I plug the brick into a foreign plug, especially with an adapter, it falls out. I’ve devised some ways to hold it level with the plug and stabilize it. Just about anything solid with some weight will work.
One method involves stacking a variety of ceramic dishes underneath. In the United Lounge in Germany the two-round-prong outlets of course needed an adapter for the US flat-prong plug. I had that, but it made the charger connection wobbly. I found a heavy ceramic mug at the coffee station, and set the charger on the upside-down cup, at the level with the plug. It worked perfectly. Another time, it took two paper coffee cups to get the height needed to hold the charger in, rather precariously, below.
Lighting
In the Peruvian Amazon, an ingenious member of our jungle research group made a light by standing a roll of paper towels on end, and putting a flashlight down inside. Then he balanced a Coke bottle on top. This odd combination gives a surprising amount of light. One night in the jungle when the lights went out early, I balanced a flashlight on a plastic container and got enough light to finish my drawing.
There are many products to buy ahead and take with you, to make life easier and more comfortable. Your local REI store has lots of choices, but these travel hacks are for unforeseen situations when you need to wing it. Headlamps and neck lights are a marvelous invention, as are small portable battery fans. All of these are re-chargeable with a USB connection. Many fans have a light and a hanging hook too, to light up your tent or your tropical tambo.
Sometimes, while doing research in remote Andean highland hamlets, I was generously offered people’s spare rooms with an iron bed, but no electricity. It’s just like camping, and you’ll need all the travel hacks you can concoct. And I’m more apt to need the comfort of a hot cup of coffee or tea in those places too. Try your hardest to get a light source figured out before sundown. You should be traveling with a little flashlight but if not, ask for a candle and matches. Or carry your own if you’re traipsing around the Andes; both are lightweight and very useful.
Coffee and Tea
I love my morning coffee. Fortunately lots of people feel the same way and have invented clever lidded travel mugs, travel presses, and insulated bottles that make it possible to get morning java satisfaction – even in a country of non-coffee drinkers. Turkish people for instance drink lots and lots of tea, even for breakfast. They do have coffee but it is like mud in tiny cups and you are not supposed to add milk or cream! So besides Starbucks’ tins or little travel packs of dry granules, available in most supermarkets, what else is there?
I know a person that travels with ground coffee and a small press that fits in an insulated tall cup. Who knew they made 16-ounce mini-coffee presses?! I’m not a coffee snob so in a pinch, the instant versions, even Nescafé, are fine with me – as long as I have milk or cream. Larger markets in some countries such as Uzbekistan sell individual packets of Nescafé instant coffee, or other brnds of pre-mixed (called 3-in-1) with sugar and/or milk powder that are quite drinkable. Instant mocha mixes are common too. You can make your own mocha or coffee blend at home with coffee granules, cocoa mix, powdered milk and sugar. I have even traveled with those tiny pots of half-and-half, carried in my travel cup so they don’t get squished.
Of course an upscale hotel will have more amenities and supplies. For instance in our small riad in Marrakech, each room has a Nespresso machine with a variety of coffee capsules and little packets of cream and sugar.
Electric Kettles and Immersion Heaters
Most hotels we stay in nowadays have a convenient electric kettle in the room. You can either pack a metal mug (it’s just a shell that you can stuff something into), or borrow a cup from your hotel. Even if the hotel has great coffee, you might want to take an insulated bottle of it on the road. A Canadian tea fanatic that travels with us brings with a small dual-current electric pot and favorite tea bags so she can have tea in her room anytime. Amazon has dual-voltage 2-cup electric pots if you really cherish tea or coffee anytime…
These pots are a great idea, but may be a bit cumbersome if you are traveling “light.” As the tea-drinking friend clearly demonstrates, it all depends on what is important to you. A container like a cup or hot pot really doesn’t take up much room when stuffed with something else like the tea bags or coffee packets to save space,
And those clever electric coils called Immersion Water Heaters that boil a cup of water fast are still available online. CAUTION: Be sure you put the metal coil IN the water before you plug it in because they get very hot very fast….I melted a coil into a pile of slag metal once when I forgot that rule.
With all electrical gadgets like water pots, hair dryers, and chargers, you must be sure they say DUAL-VOLTAGE (both 110-120v. and 220-240v.) so they work with the international electrical current of your destination. Otherwise there will be a snap, crackle, pop! and your hair dryer or tea pot will never work again. Chargers for cameras, phones, laptops and almost all devices are now dual-voltage; read the fine print on the device to be sure. It should say Input: 100-110-240 v.
Soaps and Shampoos
Many stores such as Target sell travel-size soaps, shampoo, toothpaste, and so forth, so stock up on a few of these, depending on where you will be staying. As mentioned, good hotels give you all the necessary items, but in an adobe hut in Bolivia, you’ll need your own soap and shampoo. Some travelers prefer their own brands….hotels in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco supply little bars of florescent pink soap scented with local rose perfume; you can smell like roses all day long! If you are staying some nights in a good hotel, snag a few little bottles of shampoo and bars of soap and tuck them in the corners of your luggage. They’ll make a nice present for someone, somewhere, especially someone living in a thatched dwelling without a nearby convenience store.
