Drying Out

Budget Travel, Travel

As a world traveler you may not have quite the need to dry out as she does:

but drying out may save you some hassle and there are a surprising number of options which will help you pare down the amount of liquids you carry with you. Before the restrictions on liquids started, I prided myself on packing for most trips with carry-on only. In the early days of restrictions of liquids in carry-on luggage there weren’t restrictions but rather an outright ban – so I regressed back to checking luggage and just settled for the mild ordeal of checking & claiming luggage and occasionally having to wait for my bags to be delivered though I’ve had good luck at being placed on the same flights as my baggage, which is really pretty amazing. I once took a job working for an airline – I thought that lost luggage was fairly isolated, but I was dead wrong. Seeing things from behind the scenes made me realize that luggage is lost with great frequency.

Now that baggage surcharges have become the norm and more airlines are adding surcharges for checked luggage it’s time for me to reevaluate my packing habits. True, international flights are currently exempted from these extra fees but maybe you’ve noticed that the price of fuel isn’t going down and airlines aren’t reporting profits – once we’re used to the surcharges and they become an expectation you can bet they’ll be added to international flights as well. Going with no (or very few) liquids should be easy for the traveler who will be staying at a hotel – as you can just use the hotel’s soap & shampoo, but for many of us who travel for extended periods or are gap-year or RTW travelers; well, we’re not sure where we’ll be staying or if the place we end up will have recognizable hygiene products, much less our favored brands. In actually thinking about it my own reluctance to plan on buying things like soap and shampoo on the other end of my flight has more to do with fierce brand loyalty and my doubts that I’ll be able to purchase my favorite brands where I end up than anything, but I’m horribly cheap and will cast those loyalties aside in short order to save a buck or two. The logical solution is to just totally give up on brand loyalty and purchase everything at destination but that comes with its own set of disadvantages – such as arriving at a weird hour and departing to some remote place before any stores open up. Same idea applies if you have a tight connection like a plane that arrives at 5pm and a bus that leaves at 6 – you’re simply not going to have time to go shopping for soap. Another disadvantage to this approach is that it can be wasteful if you were to buy a bottle of shampoo use it for a couple of weeks then ditch the remainder before hopping a flight for somewhere else. A solution worth considering is….well as the title of this article suggests…drying out.

Here is a product which Adam Smith would likely heartily approve of. It’s “paper” shampoo. Here’s a link. While the idea is pure genius and the product is quite interesting – well, it retails for $12.50 for 30 sheets of shampoo. Doesn’t really go too far in the saving money by packing dry department but it gets points for ingenuity though at that price I won’t be buying.

So far as I can tell by browsing the TSA’s evil items list, you are still allowed to bring soap in bar form with you in your carry-on. If that is indeed the case, I may turn to Dr. Bronner’s magic soap. Many of my patchouli smelling friends swear by the stuff (when they bathe) – it must be good if it can wash away that stink. The “magic” in the doc’s soap is that it can be used for soap, shampoo and laundry detergent. Another reason my left-leaning comrades like it so much is that many of the good doctor’s products are certified organic and fair trade. These certifications are beginning to lose their meaning, but that’s a different article and I think the Dr. Bronner products really are the real deal. You can find them here

Rounding out the basic necessities of personal hygiene (non) liquids is toothpaste. A solution for this proved a little tougher to find until I turned to history. Toothpaste in liquidy form hasn’t been around forever you know and save for the British people in most cultures found a way to maintain a reasonable level of dental hygiene without it. For many years baking soda was the product used to clean teeth. Arm & Hammer picked up on this nostalgia several years ago and began marketing toothpaste with baking soda in it. There market share skyrocketed until other manufacturers caught on and started making toothpaste with baking soda in it to compete. The ADA says the benefits of baking soda are negligible or possibly even detrimental. Nonetheless, baking soda provides a solution to being able to clean one’s teeth and travel dry. More and more companies are marketing dry toothpaste or tooth powder – which is essentially baking soda with some sort of flavoring mixed in. It’s quite a bit more expensive than plain baking soda and reviews are mixed concerning the added flavor.

tidbit: In many parts of the world locals use twigs from trees to clean and whiten their teeth.

A note of caution for those who wear braces, fixed dentures or other fixed dental corrector: baking soda will dissolve orthodontic glue. And a note for everyone else, baking soda can wear the enamel off of your teeth. It’s not a good idea to use baking soda as a tooth cleanser for a prolonged period of time. More info

So, for me, it looks like Dr. Bonner’s soap and some baking soda will be replacing my axe and crest. What about you? Any tips to share on drying out?

Will @ July 28, 2008