After spending about a month road tripping through Portugal and Southern Spain, we’ve now headed out to our 49th country. We’re particularly excited about this one because the landscapes and culture are incredible. It’s remote, it’s desert, and it’s actually where they filmed many movies, including Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia, and Game of Thrones. Can you guess where that is? :)

Also, last week, one of our readers asked us a really interesting question, and now that I think about it, we’ve been asked the same thing by many others: How do we pack for travelling for 2 years nonstop? Let’s get right into it.

In this Week's Newsletter:

• 🧳 How We Fit 2+ Years Into One Suitcase
• 📱 The eSIM We Wish We’d Found WAY Sooner
• 💬 What’s Coming Next + Ask Us Anything

How we pack for travelling for 2 years nonstop

One of our readers recently asked us how we manage to pack for travelling for 2 years nonstop, and more importantly, how does Nan somehow have so many pretty dresses?! 😂

When we first left for our travels, packing felt impossible. We were leaving almost all of our clothes and belongings behind, and what we could bring was confined to just one checked suitcase, one carry-on backpack, and my camera backpack. We would pick some things, swap them out, pick something else, and then do it all over again. It felt impossible to finalize the set of clothes and belongings that would end up representing “all you’ve got” for…well, who knows how long.

But we eventually came to a few realizations.

The first: packing for two weeks is basically the same as packing for two years.

You bring a couple of outfits that you can alternate for two weeks, then you go to a laundromat, wash them, and suddenly you have enough clothes for another two weeks. And the coolest part is that many countries have laundry shops on almost every corner. You hand over your bag of clothes, they weigh it, charge you by the kilo, and hand it back washed, dried, folded, and smelling nice. In South America, we’d usually pay around $5 for most of our clothes.

The second realization was a little more profound: we don’t actually need that much stuff.

In our normal lives, it’s easy to accumulate things without really thinking about whether we need them. Outfits we wear once a year, extra purses, backpacks, shoes, kitchen gadgets, and all the other random stuff that slowly fills up our homes. But when you have just one suitcase representing almost everything you own, you start to realize how little you actually need.

And honestly, it’s incredibly freeing.

A lot of the stuff we keep around our homes doesn’t just take up physical space. It also becomes a responsibility. Something to organize, clean, maintain, store, replace, or simply think about. There’s a reason Marie Kondo asks whether something “sparks joy.”

When you travel with so little, you start to understand what that really means. We have so few belongings that there’s very little to worry about. And if something breaks, wears out, or we realize we don’t need it anymore, we can simply replace it.

And finally, the question you’ve all been waiting for: where do all of Nan’s pretty dresses come from? 😂

Well…we do buy some along the way.

She got some made-to-measure dresses in Vietnam, and it’s amazing that you can have something custom-made for around $20. She also picked up some when we passed through Brazil. One of the fun parts of travelling this way is seeing all the different designs and styles as you move from country to country. So yes, we may have started with one suitcase, but apparently that doesn’t mean Nan has to wear the same dress for two years. 😉

An even better eSIM alternative

I know what you’re thinking: “Oh no, not another eSIM recommendation.”

At least for us, we’re constantly getting bombarded by eSIM ads for Airalo, Saily, and others. They keep popping up on YouTube and interrupting my Ted Talk episodes…but this one is honestly worth the 40-second read.

We’ve been using and advocating for Airalo since we started travelling. It works, it’s fairly affordable, and most importantly, it’s reliable.

Then we went to China. Since we were purchasing most of our hotels, train tickets, and other travel stuff through Trip.com, we decided to check out their eSIMs.

Yeah…you probably didn’t even realize they had eSIMs. Neither did we.

We noticed that their China plan was way cheaper than Airalo, roughly half the price, so we figured we might as well give it a try.
It worked flawlessly.

We were then headed to Korea, so we figured we’d try it there too since it was also cheaper. Again, it worked perfectly.
Then in Europe, we got a regional European plan, which can usually be pretty expensive. Once again, Trip.com’s eSIM was cheaper, and once again, it worked really well.

At this point, Trip.com’s eSIM has become our go-to.

I don’t know how they do it, but over the past four months, they’ve consistently been at least 30% cheaper than the alternatives we’ve compared them with, and they’ve worked flawlessly everywhere we’ve used them.

The only small weakness we’ve found is that it’s not quite as easy to see your plan details and remaining data when you first open the app. You have to navigate through “All Bookings,” which also contains your hotel bookings, train tickets, and everything else you’ve booked through Trip.com.But honestly, that’s a very small inconvenience for what you gain.

So if you’re planning on getting an eSIM for your next trip, it’s definitely worth checking Trip.com Esims. We’ve already saved quite a bit over the past few months, and after using it in China, Korea, and Europe, we’re pretty much sold.

Coming next week

6 'category' of experiences we think everyone should have at least once in their life. We’ve done all six, and honestly, they’ve changed the way we see the world. More on that next week. 👀

And if you have any questions, feel free to HIT REPLY and we’d be more than happy to answer it directly or in one of the future newsletters!

Talk soon! :)

Ryan & Nan

WaylessTravelers