Friends, Notifications, And the Void

The day before I left on a road trip last month I booked my hostel in Cape Town. When I arrived today they asked my name, scanned my passport, let me put my bags in storage, and said to come back at 3pm to check in. I went on a lovely aimless wander through town and returned to the desk. I wasn't on the list of people checking in today. The attendant poked through his computer and said I'd reserved in March, but the email they sent bounced and the number I registered isn't on WhatsApp[1]. I looked at the event I'd created in Google Calendar and saw I'd written "Check email or call to confirm." I'd assumed they were going to send an email during South African working hours, then promptly forgot about this TODO item during a week on the road. Oops.

Fortunately, traveling to Cape Town is more like my memories of Central America and not like modern Amsterdam, at least in shoulder season. I was able to find another hostel with an open room for a week just four blocks away. As expected, dragging my three heavy bags along the sidewalk was workable but not a lot of fun.

Speaking of my three heavy bags, before I bought my Turkish Airlines ticket I noticed their baggage page said carry-on bags are limited to 8kg. I'd never seen or heard of a carryon getting weighed, and it sounded like something a budget airline like Frontier or Spirit would do, not a flag carrier set on making Istanbul one of the busiest airports in the world. A quick Internet search found some Reddit threads with anecdata of cabin luggage not getting weighed, so I bought the ticket and mostly forgot about this limit. When I arrived at DEN (3 hours early, thankfully) the Star Alliance agent told me to weigh my carry-on first. Uh-oh. My clever packing plan had been to put my whole portable ham radio backpack in a wheelie bag, plus a change of underwear and some card games and small electronics in a big pocket. I knew this would be way more than 8kg because I'd tested the backpack radio kit on a short walk and it's heavy. (I have a lighter option, but I'm worried I'll need 45 watts to get my signal somewhere with enough hams to chase me for the magical 10 QSOs POTA target.) Fortunately there are luggage scales around the corner from the check-in counter, so I spent 45 minutes experimentally moving about 23 lbs from one suitcase to my two checked bags (each with about 5 lbs of spare weight) and my backpack, which has a width-expanding zipper. The next agent cheerfully weighed my exactly-8kg bag and checked my two exactly-50kg bags and handed me a baggage tag for my backpack without visually inspecting that it was clearly too big to fit under an airplane seat. As soon as I was out of eyesight I moved my camera bag, card games, and pockets full of granola bars back to the carry-on, knowing the gate agents have better things to do than weigh everyone's bags before they get on the plane.

I'm now going to be super aware of any objects I acquire on this trip. I'll obviously eat all the snacks, and gifting a lot of metal buttons will clear up some weight. But I'm also going to receive gifts, plus my AfrikaBurn shirt and hat. Hopefully my last lodging has a bathroom scale… or the CPT ticket agents are more chill.

8 kilograms is remarkably light for a carry-on. I was down to a mostly-empty backpack, a medical infejection pen, a folder with a dozen pieces of paper, and a fluffy pillow. I don't think I've ever had a bag this light on a plane, except my return trip from China when I put an erhu in a cardboard box in the bin. My empty suitcase probably weighs a kilo on its own. The rest of the flight experience was fine, but needing to leave a big void in my carry-on makes me not want to fly Turkish again. My lithium batteries aren't allowed in checked bags, so it makes no sense to require me to put them under the seat in a backpack while packing bulky light items like pillows in a hard-to-reach spot. Judging by the amount of space in the overhead bins they made a lot of money on extra bag fees, though perhaps they lost out on selling extra freight space.

[1] In much of the world, WhatsApp has largely replaced the open phone system because Wi-Fi and mobile data are cheaper than SMS, particularly internationally.