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Gear
- grey half-zip cotton pants (with ten pockets)
- orange tearaway pants (easy to get on when wet, but no pockets, how I missed them)
- black lightweight nylon pants
- grey polyester long-sleeve shirt
(my favoured shirt, three pockets in the back and the sleeves kept the bug bites down)
- white polyester long-sleeve shirt
- a few cotton t-shirts
- black fleece jacket
- hiking boots
- high rubber boots
- sandals
- rain poncho
- four pairs of wool socks
- assorted cotton socks and underwear
- water bottle
- binoculars
- flashlight
- camera and film
- batteries
- leatherman/swiss army knife (came in handy)
- velcro cable ties (see below)
- journal and pen
- sunglasses
- sunscreen
- anti-malarial medication
- ciprofloxacin (never needed, thankfully)
- bug repellent
- anti-itch cream (made me popular)
- soap and shampoo
- toothbrush et al.
- shaving kit
- band-aids
- large resealable plastic bags with packets of silica crystals inside for moisture-sensitive equipment
If I were going again, I’d also bring:
- liquid soap instead of bar soap (hard water)
- plastic bags with ZIPPERS (you try lining up those grooves in a rainstorm)
- more silica crystals, ask everyone you know, stock up on nori
- anti-fog stuff for the glasses
- more wool socks (they were the most comfortable, but they never dried out)
- possibly a hat, but I didn’t miss it
- nail clipper (oversight on my part)
- bathing suit, not that we ever had the chance to go swimming
- digital camera (now that I have one) in a pelican (waterproof) case
Ode to Cable Ties
I picked up a roll of black velcro cable ties for free one year at the Dragon Boat festival (they also say "Science Week",
which was a bonus). They're a strip of material, fuzzy on one side, with little hooks on the other, essentially tape made out of
velcro, like this, you can buy a spool of this stuff cheaply at
garden centers, used for attaching plants to stakes. They've turned out to be one of the most useful things I've ever seen. In Costa Rica, we
used them to attach the ends of our measuring tapes to the trunks of tree ferns. We started out tying the tape itself, but this meant you had to
remember to add on the length you used for the loop to all your measurements. Also tree ferns are prickly and not nice for undoing knots. The
velcro tape allowed us to fully extend our measuring tapes and attach and detach in seconds.
They're also useful for closing off sleeves around your wrists (or pants around your ankles) to prevent mosquitoes/army ants/scorpions from entering.
Since they work wet or dry, they can also be used to seal off the top of your boots from the rain streaming down your legs.
When I went snowshoeing on Mt. Cain, I got stuck with a pair of snowshoes that had missing straps, making them unusable, except that I had a pack of cable ties in my
backpack. By joining the ties together and looping them through the snowshoes and my shoelaces, I was good to go.
In the lab, we had a broken wireless computer mouse on which the battery kept falling out. Elastic bands kept falling off and
we didn't want to use adhesives as we still had to change the battery. Cable ties to the rescue! I've even used them to keep cables organized.
They're infinitely adjustable, they don't stretch or rip, they're lightweight, and only limited by your imagination; if I had thought of it sooner, you'd all have
received a roll for Christmas. You still might, actually.
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