The hardest question before going on the trip is what to bring with you on the journey. Here are 6 things we are glad we took with us.

1. Pocket knife

Classic, but you can’t go with out a pocket knife. Not only it’s perfect for your cheese and sausage snack during a hike, it can also be used for various other things. Besides the knife we also used the included tin opener, scissor and screw driver.

2. SteriPEN water filter

If you travel through countries without drinkable tap water you will end up using a lot plastic bottles. To stop buying water bottles and help the environment we bought a UV-light water purifier (SteriPEN). With this device it is easy and reliable to produce drinkable water. Make sure you buy the water purifier before you go on the trip since it is not available in some  countries. Also get a water bottle that works with well with the purifier. The bottle opening should be big enough to fit the purifying device and the bottle capacity shouldn’t exceeds the amount of water that can be purified with a single passing. We are happy with our stainless steel water bottle (Klean Kanteen) which can be used for cold and hot liquids.

3. Sink stopper

We found this sink stopper on the pack lists of other world travelers and are happy that we brought it with us. At times when you are tired and cold and you are just looking forward to a hot tub this little thing can save your life. Most hotels do have a bathing tub but you won’t find a stopper with it. So this plug comes very handy. Sometimes we also used it to wash cloth in the sink.

4. Noise-Cancelling headphones

Silence is great. Sometimes you just want to get away from all the noise, people talking and music playing. We use our in-ear headphones on flights, bus trips or while sleeping, for example when disturbed by noisy traffic outside. Never again without those Bose headphones.

5. Foldable cup

We find our foldable cups very useful. They are very light and don’t need much space. You can use them rinse your mouth, have a tee or eat cereal. Also you can reduce single use cups.

6. Packing Cubes

It is not always easy to keep things organised in a backpack. Packing can be super annoying. If you remove one single piece from the bag everything gets mixed up. We use packing cubes to keep things organised in our backbag. Packing cubes make it easy to pack and even easier to unpack. We both have two cubes for our clothes and exchange one cube each before we go on a plane. If one backpack gets lost we still have parts of our clothes in the other bag.