What I Pack for Six Months Away

One 40L bag. No checked luggage. That constraint has survived six months in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, and I'd defend it against anyone who tells me they need more.

Three reasons it holds. Budget airlines inside Asia charge for hold bags on almost every leg, and those fees add up to real money over twenty flights. Lost luggage is a non-event when there is no luggage to lose. And most importantly, I can walk two kilometres with everything I own, which means a wrong turn out of a train station is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

Here's the actual inventory.

Tech

This is the heaviest category and the one I refuse to compromise on, because it's the category that makes money.

Laptop. A 14-inch MacBook Pro. The 16-inch is a better screen and a worse travel companion; it doesn't fit on a Vietnamese café table with a coffee next to it, and it doesn't fit in the seat pocket of a budget flight. Fourteen inches is the ceiling.

One charger, three cables. A 65W GaN charger with multiple ports replaced the laptop brick, the phone charger and the headphone charger. Two USB-C, one USB-C to Lightning for stray accessories. Cables die on the road, so I carry one spare and buy replacements locally.

Universal adapter. Southeast Asia is mostly a mix of Type A, C and G, and the mix changes when you cross a border. One adapter with a built-in fuse.

Noise-cancelling over-ears. The single item most responsible for my ability to work. Cafés in Da Nang and Canggu are loud in a specific way that headphones fix instantly. Over-ears, not buds, because buds hurt after three hours and three hours is a work block.

eSIM plus one physical SIM slot free. I run an eSIM for arrival-day data and buy a local physical SIM within the first 48 hours, because local prepaid data in Thailand and Vietnam is absurdly cheap and much faster than roaming eSIMs. Keeping the physical slot open is the entire trick.

A 10,000mAh power bank. Not 20,000. Ten thousand charges a phone twice, weighs half as much, and stays under the airline limit everywhere I've flown. I have never once needed more.

A folding laptop stand. This is the item people cut first and shouldn't. Two hundred grams against six months of neck pain is not a close call. Mine is aluminium, folds flat, and lives against the back panel of the bag.

I've written about the rest of the working setup in my gear setup, including the things that stay at home.

Clothes

An actual count, not a vibe:

• 5 t-shirts
• 2 collared shirts (one linen, one that survives a video call)
• 1 pair of trousers
• 2 pairs of shorts
• 1 pair of swim shorts
• 7 pairs of underwear, 5 pairs of socks
• 1 light rain shell
• 1 pair of trainers, 1 pair of sandals

Everything synthetic or a synthetic blend, because it dries overnight on a balcony. Cotton in a Bali wet season is a mistake you make exactly once.

The count works because laundry in Vietnam and Thailand costs roughly $2–3 per kilo, washed, dried and folded, usually returned the next day. A full bag of my clothes is about two kilos. So I do laundry every four or five days and spend maybe $25 a month on it. That's the number the entire wardrobe is designed around.

One shirt that looks decent on camera is non-negotiable. Client calls are the reason.

Documents and money

Card redundancy is the rule. Two debit cards from different banks, one credit card, kept in three different places: wallet, bag, and one card taped inside a document folder. A blocked card in a country where you have no other payment method is the worst afternoon of a trip.

Passport, plus a photocopy, plus a photo of it in an offline folder on my phone. Copies of visas and any approval emails, offline. Guesthouses ask for passports at check-in and immigration asks for onward tickets, and phone signal is exactly the thing you can't rely on at a border.

I carry about $200 in USD cash as an emergency float. It has bailed me out twice.

The health kit

Small, and worth more than its weight. Rehydration salts, a course of basic antibiotics from home with a doctor's note, paracetamol, antihistamines, plasters, antiseptic, motion sickness tablets, and high-factor sunscreen because sunscreen in Asia is expensive and often whitening-formulated.

Add travel insurance you have actually read. Mine covers a hospital admission, which is the only part that matters.

The three luxuries

A quick-dry towel. Guesthouse towels are a lottery.

A tiny Bluetooth speaker. Six months of hotel rooms is a long time to be silent in.

A paper notebook. I plan work on paper. Nothing has replaced it and I've stopped trying.

None of this is exotic. It's the list that survived four months of Da Nang humidity and a Bali wet season without anything needing replacement.

What I stopped carrying

A drone. Bought it, used it four times, carried it for four months, then sold it in Chiang Mai at a loss. Drone rules differ by country and several places I went made flying it either restricted or a paperwork exercise. Beautiful object, dead weight.

A portable monitor. Almost a kilo with the case. In practice I worked from coworking spaces with real monitors, and the rest of the time a laptop and a stand were enough. This is the item I most confidently tell people to leave.

A DSLR. Phone cameras got good enough that carrying a second camera became a hobby I wasn't actually doing.

Books. Three paperbacks weigh more than the laptop stand and the towel combined.

"Just in case" clothes. A jumper for the aeroplane. A second pair of trousers. A jacket for a place I was never going.

The principle

Pack for the laundry cycle, not the trip length. Six months and two weeks require the same bag, because the constraint was never duration — it was how many days you're willing to go between washes.

Once you internalise that, the packing list writes itself, and everything you're still hesitating over is something you're carrying out of anxiety rather than need.