My Anti-Hoarding tips

Inspired by my friend Deidre, house converter extraordinaire, here are a few random tips for keeping down the stuff we accumulate. As Deirdre says: First World Problem, still...


1) Move house often. It's amazing how the effort of packing boxes and the cost of a container can concentrate the mind. Don't pack anything that you can't assign to a room or a purpose (no 'miscellaneous' boxes allowed).

2) Discarding clothes is hard. I have emotional attachments to my clothes: "I wore that all summer when it was so hot." "That was one of my favourite outfits when I lived in Wellington." "I wore this dress at that great dinner party."... My solution is to be harsh and stuff everything I haven't worn in a while into a bag and stash it in the bottom of the wardrobe for  on cycle of seasons (varies by climate). I can take out anything if I think of it and miss it, wear it and put it back on the hanger. Anything else gets chucked without looking at again at the end of the term. The 'not looking at it again' is the magic ingredient, because otherwise my memories are triggered and I can't do it. Works a treat.

I have also been known to cut up a load of old jumpers and patchwork them into a blanket, or to frame that perfect t-shirt. That requires a bit of a DIY effort, but can be worth it.

3) Get a scanner and Evernote or Dropbox to cut down on paperwork. I use the Fuji Scansnap 5500M, as it has a multi-page feed and scans double-sided directly to a folder. Great for articles and receipts, and you can set it to do OCR - text recognition - so the article is full-text searchable. Then dump it all into Evernote or Dropbox until you need to read it again.

4) Indulge one vice. It might be hats, or art books, or commemorative mugs. I collect camels. No guilt, no restrictions.

5) Find a freecycle place or a charity. Passing on items rather than throwing them out is much easier. Often what you don't need, someone else is looking for. I am not keen on selling on eBay, it's a lot of effort for little return. Be generous with the things you don't really need any more, and make someone else happy. Sometimes just placing things next to a bin rather than in it means that someone else will find it and take it home.

There you have it, my anti-hoarding tips.

Border crossings

Arriving in Europe through the Balkans has meant many many border crossings. One day we had breakfast in Macedonia, coffee on the high plains of the Kosovo and dinner on the coast of Montenegro. Countries have blurred, we barely have time to put our passports away, but we have also crossed plenty of invisible borders: the ‘donkey cart on the road’ border, or the ‘reliable road signs’ border, the ‘clean toilets at roadside petrol stations’ and the ‘no more flatbread’ border. Some we have relished (who doesn’t like a clean toilet), but there are some things I miss in this return to old familiarities. There is a marked distance to strangers now. It’s not that I miss the intense privacy intrusions of Ethiopia or the hassling touts of Egypt, but the easy hospitality of Sudan and the friendly curiosity of almost anywhere we pulled up, the willingness to accept my poor attempt at local language in the Arab world.

One of the concerns I had about this trip has been whether we’d be able to cross all those African borders, whether we’d have to bribe people, whether we’d be refused visas or have our car searched. None of these worries became reality in the end. Border formalities were unfailingly chaotic and inscrutable, took a few hours of standing in the heat wondering what it is about bureaucracy that wins through with even the most relaxed nationalities, but no-one ever showed one bit of interest in the contents of our car or gave us grief about our visas. There was of course the exception of Egypt where at both the incoming border at Aswan and the exit border at Nuweiba the officials displayed complete contempt for any sense of efficiency, courtesy or honesty, but that was a big exception. Now we are in the EU borders have become a part of that memory of strange things we did in Africa. We recently crossed the ‘not having to get out of the car’ border, and now they just are no more until we again leave the safe bosom of our home continent.

GPS-less in the Middle East

Oh, how we love Sally, our voluble GPS, who has been guiding us through Africa with the help of Tracks4Africa, Garmin’s East Africa streetmaps and a useful Mac program for route planning called Roadtrip. With the help of Sally we have been able to cross deserts (although Anja and Jörg’s GPX tracks of the new Sudan roads helped a lot), been able to pinpoint those elusive ferry crossings in Kazangula, Dar Es Salaam and points North; and make sure that we always found a camp site every night, even in the wilds of Ethiopia (although for some reason it didn’t list Tim and Kim’s). But the further North we went the sparser T4A got and when we left Egypt, our GPSing finally stopped and we were officially back to paper maps. Unfortunately the Middle East is neither well mapped nor blessed with book stores where a lost traveller might pick up a route book, so we have mostly been relying on the US basemap Sally falls back on when she is as clueless as we are, and the - utterly unsuited to driving - town maps of various Lonely Planets and Rough Guides (the Bradt guides weren’t even in the running as navigation aides, as their maps seem to have been lovingly hand drawn by a casual visitor to the region without access to any of the freely available satellite imagery, i.e. Google maps). This has resulted in a lot of aimless driving round Arab city centres trying to establish where we are, where we are trying to get to and generally being aggravated with each other. Here is an example of our attempt to find the Baron Hotel in Aleppo:

As you can see we took a spiral approach to our destination, in fact we drove past the hotel a few times before we found it, despite asking a variety of extremely helpful but cartographically challenged pedestrians, peering at miniscule street signs in the dark and trying to divine the direction of North by trying to remember where the sun set an hour ago.

So now you know that GPSless driving in foreign countries can lead to frustration, arguments and eventually divorce. Don’t do it!

Mobile Data Update - Egypt

After multiple visits to both Mobinil and Vodaphone Egypt it transpires that there is no mobile internet for pre-paid phones in Egypt. To think how relatively easy it was to get mobile data in Sudan...

Bummer.

Yet another use for the Pogo

So I mentioned my cool photo toy - the Pogo printer from Polaroid - before, but with our travel prep in full swing I came up with yet another useful application for it. We have a set of 6 ammo boxes filled with stuff stacked on a shelf in the back of the car, but they are black so it's impossible to see what's in which one without dragging them out and looking inside. Instead of writing labels I photographed the content, printed a photo and used the sticky backing to glue it straight to the box. Voila.

Plugs of the World

I was going to write a long rant about the lack of standards related to anything from plugs to water hose connectors, to gas bottles, never mind electronics, and the annoyance factor for us travellers, but then I discovered this map and I realised that this is just another opportunity for neogeography, and that I shall map my experience of non-matching connectors in my life instead of complaining about it.

Map: Eurocom

What I love about Germany. Part 1

Mineral water in crates. You return them to a machine that counts how many bottles you have and gives you your deposit back. All sorts of recycling including batteries. There are collection boxes in the shops next to the rack of new batteries. Brilliant. Train stations and airports have bins where you can separate paper, plastic and cans.

German bureaucracy

I am taken back 30 years to my youthful job hunting days visiting the Arbeitsamt. Today it's the Rathaus to apply for a passport to fill up with African stamps later this year. There is something uniquely grim and sober about those corridors. When the rain pelts down outside and it's never going to be spring again I wonder whether it's possible to have efficiency without Kafkaesque architecture.