In July 2023, I departed for a long awaited, long planned for, seven-week solo trip to Bali – with only 7kg of carry-on luggage.
After years of single parenting my three kids; from enduring sleepless nights, nappy changes and months of breastfeeding; to kinder, primary school and high school; to years of driving countless children to and from parties and sports practice and part-time jobs; to watching hundreds if not thousands of football games, crickets games, lacrosse games, swimming carnivals and sports days, and enduring one incredibly painful dance season; to completing year 12 four times (only one of these was for me); cooking dinner at least 300 times a year – year in and out; teaching three teenagers to drive; and so on, I declared to my young adult children that 2023 was all mine.
I was off to Bali on my own – all alone, solo, with no-one else, unencumbered, with nobody, sans kids, sans anyone, simply … sans.
My idea was to live and work in Bali to get a taste for being a midlife digital nomad. My aim was simple – I wanted to simplify my life.
I planned to base myself in Ubud for five weeks where I would indulge in daily yoga, eat well and write, and then devote the last two weeks of my trip to tick off a very big Life List goal – learning to surf.
The aim of simplification was important to me. I was desperate for quiet. For peace. To remove everyone’s access to me. To stop having to make decisions for everyone else. To simply be. Simple.[/vc_column_text]
To minimise this stress, I engaged a concierge service to arrange my visa (with the promise of being able to extend it for me as I was staying beyond 30 days), allowing me to bypass at least one queue, and then being walked to an arranged driver. Lovely.
The final hurdle was what to do about my luggage. I was going to be in Bali for seven weeks and would be enjoying a range of experiences from an overnight hiking trip up an active volcano on Lombok to yoga to surfing to working. Surely this would require around 20kg of checked in clothes, shoes, books, my computer, a gazillion power cords, bathers, undies, beach towel, toiletries, sunscreen, hat, hiking boots, my puffer jacket (for the overnight trip on the volcano), etc, etc.
Things started to feel a little stressful again. Post COVID – at a domestic level – I had already experienced multiple delays waiting for checked-in luggage to be delivered to the carousel. My worst nightmare was a 65-minute wait after a flight from the Gold Coast to Melbourne. What would an international experience be like?
When I dug a little deeper and checked the data on lost and mishandled luggage post COVID – things got worse. The 2023 Baggage Insights report from the aviation company SITA reported a massive 75 per cent increase in mishandled baggage in 2022, with 26 million bags being misplaced. That’s 7.6 bags for every 1000 travellers. International travellers were hardest hit with 19.3 mishandled bags per 1000 travellers. According to a report from Compare the Market, a third of all Australians have lost their luggage while travelling.
Checked luggage was suddenly a hard no for me. It was time to cull 20kg of checked-in luggage down to 7kg of carry on luggage – to ensure I travelled light and experienced a seamless, stress free (or significantly stress reduced) trip.
My five luggage rules for seven weeks in Bali – rules that I now live and die by for a full carry-on experience regardless of the length of my stay – are:
- only pack what I can’t buy at my destination
- only pack one of everything except undies and socks
- wear all the heavy or bulky items on the plane (for Bali this included my hiking boots and puffer jacket)
- invest in a Kindle
- find a great local laundry. (In Bali, the Mae Mae Laundry was at my doorstep in Ubud, providing a next day full laundry service for 20,000 IDR per kilo. That’s $A2.)
Simple.
Could you travel with only carry-on? Would you want to? Why not share your thoughts in the comments section below?
