Writer & Business Reporter
It’s the night before my first deadline day filing for both NWT News/North and Nunavut News/North, and I’m trying not to panic. In a few hours, I have to file four more business stories and two collections of briefs. I am still desperately emailing people for interviews for the next morning and already imagining giant holes in the paper. But at this point, my brain is already fried and my handling editor, Josh, has other ideas.
Six hours before my flight, I was still packing. And I had to do it on the floor of a parking garage.
On top of everything that had happened that day, one of the zippers in a new suitcase had broken and I had to transfer everything to a new one that night.
I took this picture after I learned all my summer clothes, my underwear and my travel towel had been given away to someone else after a laundromat staffer in Norther Peru mistook me for a Japanese girl.
Packing for the Inca Trail is a bit weird. You’re really cold at night, sweaty during the day and the conditions can be all kinds of extremes.
How do you deal with all these conditions? By being prepared for everything, but just enough.
Figuring out what to bring on a backpacking trip can be incredibly daunting. There are a huge number of conditions to consider, including climate, trip length, difficulty of excursions and size of your pack.
Here are some important general things to consider when shopping and putting together your gear.
Clearwing butterfly. (Genus Ithomia) Iguazu National Park, Argentina.
When I traveled through Latin America, I had a 65L pack full of stuff. But I quickly learned what were my absolute essentials: things I felt I couldn’t live without, worked hard to protect or were determined to fight for if someone tried to rob me.
“I didn’t pay to go on vacation and throw poop!” Taylor grins at me. “Yes Karen. Yes you did.” This is life in Nicaragua with Free and Easy Traveler. Ten days of beaches, surf, parties and stupidly-cheap alcohol punctuated by birthday parties, volcano boarding, bazooka-shooting, iguana soup and a beach olympics event that has you … Continue reading Adrenaline rush to the finish: 10 days in Nicaragua
Sometimes, there are things that happen to you so out of your control, there’s nothing you can do but keep trying to salvage whatever situation you have left. That happened to me today. Here’s how I went from my original plan of arriving in Liberia, Costa Rica last night to being stuck in San Jose … Continue reading My Super Expensive Day in Airport Purgatory
Karen’s first few hours in Lima, Peru through photos: This is all the clothing I packed. Somehow I managed to colour-coordinate everything to grey, turquoise, light green and cream. It was a total accident. Also, taking photos of all this stuff helps me keep track of what I brought in case anything gets stolen. I … Continue reading I arrived!
Karen K. Ho 