Gear & packingBy Clever Tourists · Published · Last updated
Every camera bag looks reasonable in the week before a trip and ridiculous by week three. What follows isn't a generic gear list — it's what actually stayed in rotation across 20 countries, and what got mailed home or sold off once it became clear it wasn't earning its weight.
One mirrorless body did essentially all the work. A second body sounds appealing as insurance against a failure or theft, but on a trip this long the honest tradeoff is weight and bulk carried every single day against a failure that, in over a year on the road, never actually happened. A single reliable body plus a genuine repair-or-replace plan (travel insurance that covers gear, or at minimum knowing which cities on the route have a real camera repair shop) covered the same risk for a fraction of the daily weight.
Two lenses did almost everything: a versatile mid-range zoom for the vast majority of travel and street shots, and a fast prime for low light and anything that benefited from more separation from the background. A longer telephoto came along for a wildlife-heavy stretch of the trip and got mailed ahead to the next country that needed it rather than carried the whole way, which is worth considering for anyone whose route has one or two gear-specific legs rather than uniform needs the entire time.
Batteries and cards mattered more than any lens choice. Three batteries and a charger covered a full shooting day without hunting for an outlet, and cards got rotated and backed up before they were reused rather than left to fill up and get reformatted under pressure.
A second, heavier zoom lens went home after about six weeks — the mid-range zoom and prime covered the same range of shots with less bulk, and the rare shot the heavier lens would have caught wasn't worth carrying it daily for months. A full-size tripod followed soon after, replaced by a compact travel tripod that's noticeably less sturdy in wind but gets used because it's actually in the bag, which is the entire point of a travel tripod.
A drone stayed home from the start, a deliberate choice rather than an afterthought: many of the destinations on the route restrict or fully prohibit drone flights without a local permit arranged in advance, and carrying one through airport security repeatedly for the handful of countries where it would have been usable didn't pencil out against the hassle.
Cards got copied to a portable SSD at the end of most shooting days, and the SSD got backed up to cloud storage whenever a real WiFi connection made that practical — usually every few days rather than daily. The cards themselves weren't wiped until a shoot was confirmed backed up in two places, which is the boring habit that actually matters more than any piece of gear on this list: no camera body or lens failure lost a single photo on this trip, but a corrupted card would have, if there'd been only one copy of anything.
Not necessarily. A single reliable body plus gear-inclusive travel insurance (or knowing where the nearest real repair shop is on your route) covers the same risk as a second body without carrying the extra weight and bulk every day.
Yes, for most travel photography — a compact tripod that's actually in your bag and gets used beats a sturdier one left in a hotel room because it was too much to carry that day.
Only if you've confirmed drone rules for every country on your route in advance — many destinations restrict or fully prohibit recreational drone flights without a locally arranged permit, and the hassle of carrying one through repeated airport security checks often isn't worth it if only a few stops actually allow flying.
Copy memory cards to a portable drive at the end of most shooting days, and don't reformat or reuse a card until it's confirmed backed up in at least two places. Cloud backup whenever you have a real WiFi connection adds a third copy, but the daily local backup is the habit that actually prevents lost photos.
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