The Small Things

Photograph your bag, inside and out, before you check it.

If it goes missing, you have an inventory and a picture, instead of trying to remember what was in it while standing at a desk.

Put a card with your name and email inside your bag, not only on the tag outside.

Tags come off. A bag opened by an airline with contact details inside gets returned.

Take a photo of your accommodation's business card or booking confirmation.

It has the address in the local script, which is the thing a driver can read.

Set your phone to show two clocks.

Home and here. It solves calls, deadlines, and knowing whether it is a reasonable hour to message someone.

Carry a spare passport photo.

Some visas, permits and local registrations want one on the spot, and finding a photo booth in an unfamiliar town costs an afternoon.

Switch your accounts from SMS codes to an authenticator app.

If you take your home SIM out to use a local one, the codes go to a phone number you can no longer receive on. People lock themselves out of their own banking this way.

Keep a small amount of your home currency

for the moment you land back: a bus, a coffee, a taxi at an hour when nothing is open.

Fill your water bottle after security, not before.

Free, and everyone forgets.

Screenshot your boarding pass.

Apps fail at gates, at exactly the moment there is a queue behind you.

Photograph the departure board the moment a flight is disrupted.

Before you join the queue, before you do anything else. That photograph is the evidence for a compensation claim months later.

Carry a spare day of any medication in a different bag from the rest.

The one thing that must not be in the bag that goes missing.

Learn "thank you" in the local language before you land.

If you learn nothing else, learn that one. You will use it fifteen times a day.

Note one landmark near where you are staying, and which way you turned.

Thirty seconds, and it means you can always ask your way back to something people have actually heard of.

Buy the local SIM at the airport if you are staying more than a few days.

Slightly more expensive and the one time the airport option is genuinely worth it. It solves transport, maps and contact in a single step.

Note which side of the road traffic drives on before you cross anything.

The instinct to look the wrong way is stronger than you think and it is how travellers get hurt.

Carry a pen and a few sheets of paper.

Not a notebook you are precious about. A cheap pen and folded paper in a pocket. It is the thing that works when nothing else does. Write a number when you cannot agree on a price. Draw a rough map when directions fail. Have someone write an address in their own script. Take down a name, a platform, a time, a phone number. Hand it over and let them answer in writing. A pen crosses a language barrier faster than any app, needs no battery, no signal and no shared alphabet, and it lets the other person reply. Almost nobody carries one any more, which is exactly why it works so well.

Sort your cash before you leave your room.

A day's spending in an accessible pocket means never opening a full wallet in the street.

Carry cash at night, even where cards work fine in the day.

Late transport, a place that has shut its card system, a taxi when nothing else is running. This is the time when having no cash stops being an inconvenience.

Carry the smallest note you have for street vendors.

Change is often unavailable rather than withheld, and a large note can mean not being able to buy something at all.

Put a rubber band around your wallet.

It grips the pocket lining and makes it considerably harder to lift out.

Carry tissues and hand sanitiser.

Every day, everywhere. This single habit prevents the most common minor misery of travel.

Before you leave a bus, train or taxi, check the seat, the floor and the rack above you.

Every time, without exception. This is where phones and passports are lost.

Ask for the second best restaurant nearby, not the best.

You get an honest answer instead of the recommendation everyone gets.

Write down what you spent at the end of each day, not each purchase.

Thirty seconds, and it is the only budget tracking that survives contact with an actual trip.

Loop your bag strap around your leg or the chair when you sit down.

In cafés, stations, anywhere. Never hang it on the back of a chair where you cannot see it.

Use a combination padlock, not a keyed one.

Keys get lost, and a lost key on a locker with your passport in it is a bad afternoon.

Look up the local emergency number.

It is not 911 or 112 everywhere, and the moment you need it is not the moment to find out.

If you are unsure whether a street is fine to walk, look at whether local women are walking there alone.

Imperfect, and a reasonable signal.

Ask before sitting down at a shared table.

In most places it is entirely welcome, and asking is the whole difference between being a guest and being an intruder.

Carry a doorstop for rooms where the lock is not convincing.

Small, light, and it makes a door genuinely difficult to open.

Know where your phone's torch is, or carry a small one.

Power cuts are ordinary in much of the world.

Photograph a rental vehicle from four sides before driving it away.

Also the odometer and the fuel gauge.

Keep one pair of socks that is only for sleeping.

Clean, dry, worn nowhere else. A disproportionate improvement to any night in a cold room or a night bus.

Elevate your feet for ten minutes at the end of a long walking day.

Above your heart. They will be noticeably better in the morning.

Take a photo of the hotel room before you unpack and after you pack.

The first shows you what condition it was in. The second finds the charger you left in the socket behind the bed.

Once a day, look at something and deliberately do not photograph it.

Just stand there for a minute and look at it. Those are the ones you remember.