After gearing up for a couple of different African self drive safari, we have a pretty good idea of what in essential, what is important, what is nice to have and what is luxury! As we tend to travel light- mostly hand luggage only, we have becoming pretty good at nailing down our packing lists. There are always a few unknowns (mainly road conditions) and a few nights in remote campsites, so being fully prepared makes for a fun and stress free adventure.
Between Will and I, it would be hard to believe that he is the “shopper” of the family. He loves tech and gear! After much research he complied a list of equipment we take with us. Luckily, much of this equipment is useful for living on an island too!
Emergency Equipment
A Satellite Communicator
First and foremost, a small Satellite Communicator. This Garmin inReach Mini 2, Lightweight and Compact Satellite communicator, has features such as two-way messaging, location sharing and a 14 day battery life, perfect for emergency situations, or just staying in touch with friends and family when in remote locations.
- This actually put my mind at ease that if we got stuck, or there was a family emergency we wouldn’t be without communication for extended periods of time.
- Every morning we would set tracking and still have a record of our trip
- We would send departures and arrival notices to family when in more remote areas. We briefed our families what to do if they hadn’t heard form us for a couple of days when we were scheduled to be remote.
Garmin inReach Mini Dive Case
Since our daily island lives revolve around the water and Will has once had a close call many years ago being left behind by a boat, we also purchased the Garmin inReach Mini Dive Case for this. With the dive case it becomes a more practical piece of equipment that we would take boating diving and pretty much anywhere we many need it incase of emergency
high priority
Photography Equipment
Travelling light means we are pretty selective with our photography equipment. We balance between results, functionality and size. Our photography equipment still takes up a good chunk of our electronics in our bags
Main Camera
We purchased a Panasonic LUMIX FZ80 4K Digital Camera as our main camera.
Pros:
- compact
Go Pro Hero 11
Compact tripod
window Tripod
DJ
Backing up the Photos
You would be incredibly disappointed if you lost your photos. As you may spend alot of time without wifi or limited signal, you want to make sure you are not replying on backing up to the cloud. We actaully ended up with 3 different backups – our crucial harddrive, transferred to our laptop and our tablet.
Camera Phones
In many cases, our cameras sufficed, especially when hiking or wanting to pull it out of our pockets quickly. Between my Iphone 13 mini and Will’s Samsung we got some good shots
