South America Travel Gear

South America Travel Gear: Overland Equipment to Take

Although this wasn’t my first trip to South America, the voyage down the Andes was going to be my longest and in many ways the most challenging as far as what kind of gear to take. I was traveling solo, yet needed to pack South America travel gear for camping and hiking in rural areas such as parts of the ancient Inca roads that still spread down South America’s spine.

I also needed to be able to dress and function in cities where I would be interviewing people, so I needed city clothes and recording gear. I also was gathering material to write a book—so I needed a reference library as not all the books I wanted to take were in digital form. And of course I would be traveling everywhere from sea level to up to more than 16,000 feet. When I first got started in filmmaking, I wouldn’t go anywhere without heavy plastic pelican suitcases, so tightly sealed that you could put food in them and grizzly bears would ignore—or could withstand heavy rains in the jungle. Times had changed, however, and such cases were simply too heavy.

In the end, I settled upon two, lightweight, semi-hard spinner suitcases, 28 inches high, the kind with four small wheels on the bottom. Into one, I put all of my camping gear: frame backpack, sleeping bag, stove, ground cloth, sleeping pad, etc. Into the other I packed my city gear. Into a third, carry-on spinner, I packed my portable library, camera gear, etc. Pretty heavy and cumbersome, overall, but it worked well nevertheless and survived the trip. For what it’s worth, this is what I took:

South America Travel Gear:

A REI Flash 65 Backpack with metal frame
Cabela XPG Ultralight, 2-person tent & Footprint
Cabela Boundary Waters Rectangle Long Sleeping Bag, 0 degree
Thermarest Z-lite sleeping pad
Poncho Villa softshell poncho
MSR Whisperlite International stove
Asolo Hiking Boots
XLR camera (Canon)
Canon Vixia HD camera
Canon powershot S100
Digital voice recorder (Olympus)

Unlocked cell phone (with various SIM cards purchased along the way)
Laptop
Portable drives (pocket-sized, 1 Tb)
And, of course, the indispensable moleskin notebooks, pocket sized—great for jotting down impressions as they occur along the way.

Next Up:  Arrival in Medellín