Supplies I'm Glad I Brought

I'll leave out the more obvious supplies, like "our guide books," "underwear," "a toothbrush," and "my wife."

1) Our Nalgene bottles - okay this one might be in the "obvious" section, but there is no other item in our packs that we use as frequently, besides our day bags.

2) Water filter and chlorine - Again, maybe this one some people consider "obvious," but other travelers we know either brought one and didn't use it or just plain never brought one. It is true that you can easily get by without one, even hiking in the Himalaya (because the major treks are all so heavily touristed that every village and shop sells bottled water). In contrast, we've used ours extensively since we left Japan, and I fell good knowing that for every liter I pump, we save a bit of money, a bit of resources (plastic), a bit of health (the WHO doesn't even approve of Nepalese bottled water, as we learned from noted photographer and author, Chris Beal), and we help prevent pollution (the Himalaya are litered with millions of un-recycled plastic bottles). A correlary to this item is our 1.5 and 3 L Nalgene canteens, so in any given day, I'll fill up both of our 1 L bottles and the 4.5 L in the soft bags, which we'll go through in a day or two. PS - if anybody is sending things to my grandma's house in Singapore for us for Christmas, a small bottle of MSR brand chlorine solution (from REI) would be appreciated!

3) Cliff bars - A much-needed energy source throughout China when we were looking for real food options (i.e., quality street grub!), and undoubtedly, these will come in super handy when we go trekking in two weeks.

4) Pedialyte and Gatorade (powderd) - the gatorade we'd used before, but I must credit former UCLA chemist and current George Washington U law student Keith O'Doherty for introducing me to pedialyte. Even in the dilute solutions we make on or after really hot and really exhausting days seem to help perk us back up. It also helped with our recent illness (see posting below). These will also come in handy for keeping us hydrated on the trails in the Annapurna region.

5) Small camera - as most of you know, we have two cameras in our posession: the Canon Rebel XT SLR and two lenses (a 60 mm macro and an 18-200 mm zoom), as well as the Canon 700is, a compact digital camera that takes great pictures and video. I wouldn't dare be without the SLR, since I can do so much more with it than with the compact, but there are actually many days where I don't even carry it around. In fact, the more J and I use the compact, the better we are at getting it to take really nice pictures (although today, J couldn't quite get the sunset pictures she was looking for, but the XT turned out some really beautiful shots that you probably won't see until Christmas). So in general, I'm extremely happy with the pictures the compact takes, the batterly life is excellent, it fits in our pockets easily, and so I wouldn't be without that camera, either. For the record, we bought the compact the night before leaving on this trip!

6) 30 GB video iPod - besides being our storage device for the thousands of pictures we've taken so far, there are nights (and long plane rides) when I'm so happy to be able to put that thing on and just listen to my music. As an added bonus, I spent a bunch of time before leaving ripping a few movies and some of our favorite TV shows (Family Guy, Simpsons, Venture Bros., etc.) onto the iPod for our entertainment; we've already watched Anchorman twice on this trip!

7) Handkerchief (Thanks Bert!) - This thing is great, acting as a profalaxis for dirty pillows, a mask against unbelievable smells and pollution, a cooling device (when wet), and an impromptu towel, among many other things. I can only hope that the laundry place we went to two days ago still has it, because we didn't get it back yesterday when we picked it up. I'll have to check with them tonight......

8) Oragami bowls and a sporknife - Yes, we brought foldable plates, bowls, and cups, as well as a sturdy plastic sporknife (that's a spoon, fork, and knife all at once!). We've used thse extensively, especially for breakfast cereals (hot and cold, thank you Horliks!), but we also made our own dinner a few times, as well as lunches. The utensils have been particularly useful, for example on the horse trek we took in Songpan, where moldy old chopsticks were distributed for each meal, then washed in the nasty river nearby. No thank you!

Okay, there's probably more, and I know Justine wanted to blog on this topic, too, but since she's kind of a "blog bum," you'll probably have to wait another month or two for her take. I'd also like to brag that I've finished a couple of books on this trip, despite having very little time to actually read (but comparatively much much more than before we left for the trip). I have read former punk rocker Joe Meno's book "Hairstyles of the Damned," "Hard Travel to Sacred Places," by Rudolph Wulritzer, the 1984-1991 Royal Kumari's autobiography "From Goddess to Mortal," and am currently half-way through Charles Darwin's first edition of "On the Origin of Species." What have you read in the last two months?

ps - I'm only bragging because I so rarely had a chance to read books before I left, so I feel a sense of accomplishment for having finished 3 and a half in 8 weeks, besides the fact that I've also read huge chunks of the Rough Guides book for Japan, and the Lonely Planet books for China and Nepal.