Travel & Adventure

I just got to Singapore for Neoteny Singapore Camp 1 and wanted to post my initial findings on this jet lag hack I’m trying out. A few months back Joi pointed me towards this study which suggested that fasting for 16 hours prior to traveling, and then eating when it would be breakfast in the timezone you are traveling to can force reset your internal clock. I thought Los Angeles to Singapore was a pretty good time to try this out given the 16 hour time difference.

A few months back I made a similar trip, LA to Hong Kong and was wrecked for days. Granted I’m only a day into this but so far I’m feeling great and not at all like I have with lengthy/multi-timezone trips in the past. It’s 10PM right now and I’m just starting to get sleepy, right about the same time I did yesterday when I was in Japan (1 hour difference) for a layover. I woke up this morning at 6am which is about the same time I start to wake up on a normal day when I’m home.

So here’s what I did:
• Stopped eating 16 hours before my flight
• Changed my clock to Singapore time and ate when it would be breakfast time. (in practice this worked out to be about 18 hours with no food)
• Ate again when it would be lunch & dinner in Singapore regardless of when food was served to me.
• Forced sleep with melatonin around 11PM Singapore time (even though I was in Tokyo at this point).

I woke up briefly around 2am, but feel back asleep right away and woke up for real closer to 6am. With the exception of a brief 40 minute nap around noon I didn’t sleep all day long and now at 10PM I’m just starting to feel sleepy. So far this seems like a huge win to me, it’s definitely a serious improvement to say the least. I’ll report back in a few days to see if anything caught up to me, but right now I’m thinking this is legit.

I have a dream..

That dream is to never have to pack anything when I travel because everything I need will be waiting for me in my destination. It’s crazy I know, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite sometime. So usually when someone talks about ‘Urban Caching‘ they are either talking about geocaching in an urban setting, or some kind of city specific survival cache. Both of which are interesting in their own right but not what I’m talking about here. I’m thinking about something a little more functional.

Part of the original MultiBasing plans spawned from the idea that, or rather the frustration that I was feeling packing the same things all the time when traveling to the same city. When I talked to some friends (like Joi and Tim) who also travel a lot, and to many of the same places I found they had the same issues I did.

On a super obvious level if I live in Los Angeles (I do) and it almost never drops below 40° F here then I really have no reason to have big jackets and gloves. I certainly have no reason to have snow gear. That is unless I travel to places where it does get colder. But then I’m stuck in the situation of having something that sits in my closet until I pack it to take it somewhere, use it there, then pack it up and bring it back and throw it in closet. Just keeping it in the place I’m going all year makes much more sense, the question is how to do that.

If I have a friend there and can leave it at their house then problem solved. But maybe I don’t and I need to rent a locker somewhere or hide something in an office that I’m fairly sure I can get back into next time I’m in town. Hotels would be ideal but are rarely cool with the idea of holding your crap when you aren’t there paying on a daily basis. So that is on challenge, but assuming you do find a place to keep items, maybe this idea can be expanded? Climate specific things are obvious, but do I usually bring the same things to many places? Actually, yes I do.

So lets get one travel tip out of the way real quick – packing for a 1 or 2 day trip is much harder than packing for a week or more. When you start packing for a week you have to think about items you can wash and reuse which often results in bringing less. When you are packing for a day or two, everything you bring is single use and often you get sucked into the idea of “options.” If you are traveling for one specific event, you might bring 2-3 things that you could wear to it resulting in returning from your trip with things you never even touched. When you are packing for longer periods of time everything gets used.

So that in mind, in theory, you could create a pack of commonly used/worn items and leave them in the major cities you pass through or visit regularly. This would contain about a weeks worth of clothes covering various options – several casual things, a few nicer items, perhaps a jacket or different shoes. Depending on your work perhaps a suit. This creates a bit of a redundancy issue, in that you’ll likely have a few of the same thing, but if they are scattered out around the world that isn’t really a problem. And once you have this “basic” pack together and stashed in a few different cities, then what you need to take with you next time you go to one of them is suddenly reduced immensely.

If you find you need something you hadn’t anticipated you can probably just wear it on the trip itself. Or maybe you’ll need on very small carry on, maybe a backpack or something.

And maybe this doesn’t just apply to clothing. I know we are getting very speculative here, but with more and more data being stored in the cloud it could be possible to not even need to bring a computer with you. When you can pick up a brand new netbook for under $300, depending on your needs, that could more than do the trick for a few day trip.

Assuming this all makes sense and worked, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine being able to travel between a handful of cities on a regular basis and never need to pack anything. The thought of flying internationally without the headache of any luggage makes me giddy. Anyway, obviously this is still firmly in dreamland for the moment, but I do really think it’s not only viable but a very real option in the near future. And if you add into that pack a few disaster/survival/preparedness related items you’d be pretty well covered anywhere – or at least anywhere you regularly visit.

This last weekend Tara and I spent a few days at El Capitan Canyon, an anniversary gift from our friend Mike. Shane says he liked to call the place “fancy camping” which is pretty accurate. It’s outside and surrounded by nature for sure, but inside the cabins things were fairly civilized with big soft beds and giant soaking bath tubs so it was pretty far from roughing it. There was a fire pit outside so if you are so inclined, as we were, you can cook and make smores and totally pretend you are camping for real.

We kept seeing signs all over the campground warning us about Cougars/Mountain Lions which were common in the area. We saw deer, gophers, rabbits, bugs, and all kinds of other stuff but none of these fabled mountain lions. I figured they were probably just scared so to try and make friends with them I left some garlic and onion potato chips on the porch one night before we went to sleep. I passed right out but Tara said at some point in the night she heard something up on the porch eating them. She didn’t look, but it’s a pretty safe assumption that it was a mountain lion as far as I’m concerned.

In fact, my guess is that in this economy the mountain lions are getting hit hard and probably starving so the chips I left out there probably saved their lives. I’m pretty much a damn conservationalist at this point, I’d say.

Day 2 in Hong Kong, finally bought the internet in the hotel room so I can spend an moment updating you to the wild affairs. Let me tell you, leaving Los Angeles at 1:50am, flying 14 hours and landing in Hong Kong at 7:05am makes for some really wicked jet lag. I’m usually pretty good at combating it with a combo 5 Hour Energy Drinks and Melatonin but even this had we all messed up. Tara and Jason were equally wrecked. We did some basic walking around yesterday but do to being tired and hungry and overall just out of it we didn’t really see much. I took some photos with my iPhone but for some reason it can’t connect to Google’s imap to send them so I haven’t been able to post anything yet. I’m going to take my real camera out today which I can upload right to my laptop and I’ll be able to post them in a batch. There’s also a Typhoon at “signal 3” which is apparently a big deal, or at least a big enough deal that they have warnings around and have the pool is closed which has been no shortage of distress for Tara. It’s been amusing to see her arguing with the staff about how regardless of the thunder and lightning, the posted hours for the pool state that she should be allowed in damnit. They weren’t convinced.

The coffee at this hotel is close to, if not the worst I’ve ever tasted in my entire life though. I’ll definitely be opting for the HK$400 Starbucks Soy Latte’s for the rest of the trip because holy puketackular.

Speaking of there is a Starbucks, a 7-11 and a McDonalds on pretty much every corner. I wish I was making that up.

It’s also crazy humid, which I’m pretty good with but it’s still rough. And I finally bought a rain coat though have been able to avoid actual water falling from the skies thus far. We’ll see how the rest of the day fairs.

Skipping the photo this time in exchange for a packing list. Tonight I leave town for 2 weeks heading to Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. I’m Platinum level with AAdvantage so when I fly American Airlines all the carry on/weight limit rules don’t apply to me, this time however I’m flying Cathay Pacific so I actually have to take this all into account because I refuse to check luggage unless absolutely unavoidable, especially internationally, especially on discount airlines.

So according to the rules I’m allowed one carry on which can not exceed 15.4 lbs and is not larger than 22x14x9 inches. I’m also allowed one additional item such as a laptop and case, camera bag or purse, though that can’t exceed 9 lbs. This is going to be tricky…