Yang Ke took care of her new passport and EU visa application and I got ready for my exam. After being deprived of good Chinese food for nearly half a year we indulged in home-cooked food and several restaurants and enjoyed the clear autumn weather with daily climbs to our dear 1668-steps mountain.
After being on the road for so long this was also a good chance to repack our bags, store items we no longer needed and resupply ourselves for the European winter.
From the start we tried to optimize our luggage to be as light as possible and never ever regretted it. A key strategy is to get yourself a backpack one number smaller than you actually think you need, which forces you to keep all those extra sets of clothes at home and prevents you from accumulating too much rubbish (souvenirs) during your travel. Like most long-term traveler we spent quite some time looking for our favorite backpack, a companion you will spend hours carrying on your back while searching for your next hostel, squeezing it into chaotic buses and zipping/ unzipping it a thousand times.
The large majority of back packs available are developed with hikers or mountainclimbers in mind and for many reasons not very suited for normal backpackers like us. Luckily there have been a few initiatives over the last 2-3 years from passionate individuals to plug this hole in the market, which often got their products on the ground thanks to Kickstarter & co.
We quite quickly decided on the Tortuga backpack (www.tortugabackpacks.com) which, at least on the paper, won against its competitors in a landslide. The only point I was hesitating for was its bit smallish volume of 40l but (cf. key packing strategy) that worry remained unfounded 
Now, after 6 months of traveling, we are still as happy with our tortugas as ever and appreciate all its advantages:
- Full-length zipper along the whole front, to allow easy access to all your stuff
- As all openings are by zip you can lock them all with standard locks. Great to deter the little thefts during plane transport or in the hostel. Always found it very unsatisfying that particularly the cheaper accommodations where you might need a safe, dont have one, whereas the expensive well-run hotels where you don’t really need one, they have a safe for you
- Well padded compartment for laptop
- Size is maximized to be still permitted for cabin carry-on! Didn’t consider this so important in the beginning, but we used it quite a bit. Usually we would bring one tortuga with us to the cabin, containing the more valuable items, like electronics, and in airports/airlines with bad reputation we would even bring all bags along. Great to have this flexibility
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