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I don't think I will list or write about every single thing we are bringing right down to the latest carbon fiber toothbrush but I will mention a few things.
Let me say right up front we are not real experienced bike tourists but we are real experienced backpackers and cyclists. We have been into ultralight backpacking for a few years and a totally sold on that concept and gear. My base weight without food for a backpack is under 17 pounds including a tent with a fly and a pad. In this case we are going to be on our bikes for a long time so there may be a few luxuries that we will bring that you might not on a one week backpack trip. Besides it is much easier to roll loads around than carry them on your back.
The Bikes and Wheels We are taking pretty much stock Surly Long Haul Truckers. In Patagonia the majority of American touring cyclists had LHTs and Ortlieb panniers (most of the bike tourists in general regardless of the country had Ortliebs. One ferry operator was teasing a big international group of us asking if we were team Ortlieb and sponsored by them), so if you are in the market for a touring bike and do not want to agonize over which bike to get the LHT is a safe bet. The euros would often comment that you could tell the American bike tourists because they all had LHTs.
There are probably some of you out there who are looking for an extended discussion for the ultimate touring machine and the ultimate parts like Rohloff internally geared hubs etc. I am as big of a gear head as any but do you really want to tour around in a second or third world country in a top of the line bike with the accompanying paranoia about it being stolen? If it gets stolen or damaged do you have the resources to have one express shipped to a foreign country at great expense and also have deep enough pockets to not to think twice about it once you start touring again, assuming your vacation time is not over by then? When it comes to bikes usually more expensive is about a quest for lighter weight. That strikes me as kind of silly when the vast majority of bike tourists I see are not seriously skimping on the creature comforts they are pedaling around with. If you really want to shed weight and bulk, research things like light sleeping bags, pads, tents etc. For the price of a Rohloff hub you could be outfitted in state of the art ultralight camping gear.
Both of our bikes have 26" wheels for ease of getting parts in areas where 700c wheels are not common. We have read that a lot and personally experienced it ourselves. You run into rental places with mountain bikes far more often, which in Patagonia is not all that often. The shops with 700c wheels tend to be in big cities or upscale places like Bariloche and those 700c tires and wheels are typically for sporty road bikes not touring bike widths. I ride a folding bike a lot when traveling for work and 26" wheels seem ponderously big compared to that. So 26" being slower than a 700c wheel is a total non issue for me. I love the way the 56cm LHT handles with the 26" wheels.
In hindsight the 26" wheels were a good call as we heard many stories about 700c parts being hard to find. I would even go so far as to use schrader valves as in a lot of towns the presta valve tubes are hard to find. The only problem with those is that they are harder to pump up with portable bike pumps. Speaking of pumps our Topeak Road Morph pumps were "the bomb". What a great pump.
Another wheel issue is the number of spokes. Most bikes specifically built for touring often come with 36 spoke wheels. Most mountain bikes come with 32 spoke wheels. If you are wanting to tour for cheap on a converted mountain bike that might be an issue. We saw lots of people especially locals touring on mountain bikes in Patagonia. Although the LHTs come with 36 spoke wheels I think 32 would work fine if you have light loads and are not to heavy yourself. If your loads are under say forty pounds then probably the 32 spoke wheels would be ok but that is just a wild guess. In a comment below i mention some tandem tourers who had unbelievable amounts of problems with their spokes and wheels. They had twice the weight on those two wheels. As far as i could tell they never made the connection.
We saw about equal numbers of bikes with and without front suspension and associated mountain bike tires.
Although we did not have them mountain bike type handlebars would be an asset when breaking down the bike for travel. You could also put pogies on those which would be a huge asset in cold, rainy windy conditions where you could shift and break with your hands inside them.
The crankset on the LHT is a five bolt which is really hard to find chain rings for in Chile and Argentina for some reason. I am not sure why they specified those on the bikes instead of the more common four bolt mountain bike ones. Local mechanics here in Bend say they are really common in the US but I sure did have a hard time finding them in South America.
Tires The tires have been changed to inch and a half wide Continental Travel Contacts for dirt roads from the stock city tires. We have a couple of folding Schwalbe Marathons for spares. We took the bikes out fully loaded on some mountain bike trails with some soft sand and the Continentals worked great. It turns out that you need to try your gear on bad gravel as well as dirt.
Here is a big one if you do much touring on gravel roads. Our Continental Travel Contacts did well but i think i would opt for two sets of folding tires. One set would be for pavement and the other would be a full width mountain bike tire for gravel. If you are all day on ruff gravel the extra cushion of a wider tire running at lower pressures would be a big benefit especially if you do not have a front suspension. We have been draping a spare folding tire over a rear pannier to lean the bike up against stuff and that is working out great. In Colombia the Continental Travel Contacts were just fine as all around tires. We never used the folding Schwalbe Marathons we brought as spares. It looks like the Continental Travel Contacts still have a lot of miles left on them after four months.
Mud Guards\Fenders We could have lived without these. The rear rack and waterproof paniers act like a fender. A fairly big negative is that for the times when you want to throw the bike on a bus they make it less compact. When it was really raining all day and cold we tried to sit it out under a shelter of some sort preferably a hotel. Plus if it is really cold and rainy we were wearing the most water proof stuff we had so what difference do fenders make other than maybe keeping muddy water off your glasses if you are wearing those in the rain. In Columbia at lower elevations we welcomed the rain and enjoyed getting all wet. Verdict? - based on experience from this trip I would say they dress up the bike but they are really not worth it. It is also one less thing to disassemble and put in a box when needed.
The Panniers We have Ortlieb Back Packer Plus bags which on the last, week long trip, they were more than we needed even without any front panniers. The tent and pads even fit inside. We were both under 24 lbs. This trip I will be taking front panniers only for areas where food and water may not be available for several days to have the extra capacity if needed. Ortlieb makes some adapters that convert the panniers into back packs that we are going to try out for maybe some short over night hikes or getting around the airport with a carry on. (We would take those pack adapters again. We used them a lot.)
One reason we went with the Backpacker Plus panniers is that they have a lid top and not a dry bag roll top so that items inside could dry somewhat instead of being totally sealed like in a dry bag. I agonized quite awhile about size but as long as you are not one to fill all available space the big bags are nice to have if you come across that much desired loaf of bread. The bags are bigger but it is nothing like the difference between say a weekend backpack vs and expedition one that is twice as big. The difference in rear panniers is not that much really. The downside to the Cordura type bags is that they are harder to clean especially the light colored ones. The external pockets on the Backpacker Plus one are kind of hard to use. Most of the tourers we ran across had their tents on top of the rear loads and not inside the panniers.
The Ortliebs are ridiculously easy to remove by just pulling up on the handle. So for security I put a couple of D rings on the tracks that can be secured by a small cable lock. Ortleib sells a little cable kit that you can lock to the rack but the D rings at the hardware store cost forty five cents.
We saw two different pairs of guys using trailers in Patagonia. One pair was riding the other way and we did not get a chance to talk to them. The other two we did. They were having issues. One day they both had brakes fail on some big steep descents. With the cobble gravel roads I think trailers would not be such a good idea as they would probably bounce around a lot but I have no first hand experience. Another issue with the trailers is that they would be hard to get on a bus or the back of a pickup truck in a pinch. They also would be that much more to get on a plane. If you pack light the weight of a trailer is nearly the base weight of camping basics so to me unless you have some need to carry a lot of gear or weeks of food I am not sure what the benefit would be. It would also be much more difficult to creatively weave in and out of traffic in congested bigger cities if the need arises. In those cases you want to be as light and nimble as possible.
Racks Sturdy racks are a must as we encountered many people with broken cobbled together racks. Aluminum racks also will wear through. I had some sturdy Cevia ones I bought at a real good price but unlike Laurie's Tubus ones there are a couple of places where the panniers have rubbed all most through the Aluminum tubing. The steel ones rust a bit where the panniers mount but not much and you can paint those places for maintenance. Also your odds of being able to find someone to weld a steel rack in small towns is much higher than aluminum would be.
In the front I used Tubus Duos that worked just fine and occasionally I hung a lot of heavy food in them. Quite a few people said that those would not hold up or carry enough weight but the Touring Store online retail guy said that it was more a function of how strong the front forks were and the Surly LHT was plenty strong enough. If those racks do not hold up you might want to seriously consider renting a car to haul your travel necessities. I think I can pretty safely say that racks that hold up to twelve hundred k of the Carretera Austral will hold up to just about anything. One advantage of the over the top type front rack is that you can mount odd things to the top like the guy who mounted his cross country ski boots to the front rack.
The Tent and Pads Not too long ago we started using a Big Agnes Fly Creek Two tent instead of bivys and or tarp tents. It is hardly much more weight and obviously nicer than a bivy. So far I would give that tent five stars for sure. I thought about buying a three person one for this trip but we will probably be staying in hospedajes a fare amount.
Some people bring bigger tents for bike touring even if they have smaller backpacking ones. The reasons vary. One reason is to be able to keep paniers in the tent for ease of access, security or to keep them out of the weather even thought most are waterproof. Other people want something they can live in comfortably during bad weather instead of renting a room. One woman just liked having a place that felt like home to her when traveling. She had a little vestibule outside the tent for cooking and her kitchen was very comforting to her. The problem with the bigger tents is that they often weigh twice as much and do not pack inside a panier. Even if you had a paniers tall enough for a big tent they would take up at least half a full sized panier. So that necessitates laying them on top of the paniers either crosswise or lengthwise on top of the rack. Tents are a relatively heavy part of a touring load and if you put them on top you raise the center of gravity quite a bit. To each his own. We were totally happy with the small tent but we rented rooms if the weather was bad enough to not ride for the day or on lay over days in towns. Spending all day on a rainy day inside a small tent barely big enough to sit up in is no fun for sure but then so is spending all day in a medium size tent.
Here is an idea on how to pack a tent so that you would not have to put it on top of the rear paniers. Stuff the main tent in the bottom of one of the paniers and possibly the fly and ground cloth with it. Then take the poles and lash them to the inside of the paniers near the top of the rack or possibly one of the tubes of the frame. Another option would be to put the fly and ground cloth somewhere easily accessible, that way you could pull out the fly in rainy or weather or if it is a natural color it could be used to cover up shiny bikes and brightly colored paniers if you need to hide them. Also the ground cloth can be used as something to sit on for lunch if need be.
The pads we used the Thermarest NeoAirs. They are light, pack small, warm, full length and are extremely comfortable. A common complaint for the Neoairs by people who decide not to buy them is that they are too noisy because of the crinkley fabric. All i can say is that is not an issue for us and we both have such positive associations with those mats becuase of how well we sleep on them that it barely crosses our minds. They seem like they would not be very durable on first inspection but we must have blown them up and slept on them a hundred times and never had to repair them. The only thing is they take a lot of blowing up which can get old and the moisture from your breath we have heard can be a mildew problem in humid climates. So I did a little searching on the internet and came up with this product called an Instaflator. You can make something similar yourself with a plastic garbage bag. The Instaflator deal only cost a few dollars and weighs hardly anything. I wrapped some duct tape around the end of the nozzle to patch it up if need be. (The five dollar Instaflator was a big winner and lasted the whole trip without needing a patch amazingly. Best five dollars I ever spent.)
Quite a few bike tourists, mostly euros but some Americans had the Exped mattress which is down filled. Those are heavier and bulkier but the people who had them swore by them as much as we swore by the neo airs. We were never cold because of the neo air pads and they do make an even warmer winter version now if you think you need it. The Expeds have a built in pump. I was kicking myself for not trading with someone who had one to compare the two.
We are bringing thermarest chairs that normally you would stuff the air matress in for padding but we are not sure the neoairs would hold up to that. So we are bringing some cut down foam pads that fit in those and can be used for quick naps or in Laurie's case maybe yoga too.
Pedals There is a lot of controversy about what pedals to use when touring. Before touring for me there was absolutely zero controversy and I use clipless pedals except for around town. A lot of tourists are advocating using just flat pedals to save weight and ease of walking when not pedaling. I commuted every day to work this fall and switched back and forth from flat pedals to traps and then to clipless pedals to test that out. For me when you need to really power up and maybe stand on the pedals, clipless wins hands down. So what we are going to do is bring pedals that are flat on one side and clip on the other with mountain bike shoes that are not ultra stiff and you can walk in. Those pedals are a pain around town when you have to flip them over to whatever side you want but for touring you are not in and out of your pedals a lot. The other shoes are going to bring will be those new ultralight running shoes inspired by the five toes jobs. If we need to hike in rocky terrain then we will use the mtn bike shoes with the cleats out and rubber inserts put in.
On rough gravel roads I found that cleated spd mountain bike shoes were harder to walk in so I used hiking shoes instead. Plus on bad gravel you may need to frequently step down off the bike pedals to the gravel. Some of the hills in Patagonia are steep enough that you either cant peddle up them or you need to take a break and walk. Having that metal cleat under your foot when you are on the balls of you feet pushing up some steep hill is undesirable. For all you guys and gals who think you could peddle up any road, some hills are so steep that even if you have the horsepower with a fully loaded bike the wheels will lose traction.
If you use sandals in the tropics you need to make sure they work with your chosen pedals when wet without slipping off. On another trip around Kona Hawaii I had Keen Commuter II Bike Sandals. They worked great. I wished I had those in Colombia. Apparently Shimano used to make good bike sandals but the current ones are not very.
Electronics We are going to try and get by without a laptop so as not to have to worry about that being stolen and they do add a significant amount of weight. We have a few things like cheap Kindles that we are going to try to see if we can keep alive partially with a solar charger battery deal by solio. The solar charger was not necessary as with modern electronics the batteries last long enough you can charge them here and there as necessary.
We are bringing a GPS camera. Quite a few manufactures are making those now for very reasonable prices - hardly much more than a real simple point and shot. You can upload those to a web album via Picasa and it automatically puts them in a map in a slide show! If all goes well check that out in the blog when and if we get rolling. Bring an extra battery for most cameras especially the gps ones. We have heard of more than one person losing pictures for one reason or another so back them up to SD cards or thumb drives or whatever. You can buy SD cards and thumb drives in plenty of places if you need them. Do not count on having a fast enough connection to upload pictures to the web. Having software to reduce the size of pictures suitable for web use would be a good idea so they will upload quickly.
Adapters and power supplies. In Argentina and Chile they run 220 for power so you need to make sure your electronics work with that (most do like kindles, laptops and cameras) Adapters from the US 110 to 220 are readily available down here in most of the larger towns like Puerto Montt or Coyhaique and they are cheaper than you can get them for on the Internet in the US. The outlets in Argentina do not have the center ground but you can get an adapter for that too if you need it. I needed it because the netbook I bought in Coyhaique had a ground. In Colombia the residential electric current is 110 with receptacles and plugs like in the US.
One other thing is at the time we did the trip you could not find a kindle or similar anywhere even in the big cities. We looked hard after breaking one. So you need to protect those. Some say they need to be carried flat. I carried one vertically the whole trip but wrapped it in clothes then later with some bubble wrap when i found some. I found some fat tubular bubble wrap for a printer cartridge for the netbook at an Internet cafe and that worked great. I would recommend you try to find that before you leave though.
We ended up buying a netbook because using Internet cafes was such a pain in the ass. On a short trip you could get by with the internet cafes. With a netbook you can have the browser remember your passwords. Also the internet cafes even though they maybe had connections that were fast enough the machines were so digitally mucked up and in need of house cleaning they were slow. Internet cafes also have erratic hours and often do not open until noon. In Latin America even though you can choose to say use google in English all the operating system messages are in Spanish. The Spanish keyboards are different for quite a few special keys and are hard to use if you are not used to them. Most Internet cafes appear to seldom clean their keyboards. If you need to use something like google earth forget it at the Internet cafe. If you are touring or camping you can compose something for a blog or email in a word processor to send later. This is really huge. You do not want to spend an hour or two at an Internet cafe in the middle of the day when you pass through some town that has one. It is really natural to write about your day at the end of the day or the start of the next one if your spouse is sleeping in. Modern netbooks have good battery life, good enough for touring.
Stove Laurie gets asked this a lot for some reason. For backpacking in the US we just use the little MSR pocket rocket but for this trip we need one that burns anything so we are taking a Primus OmniFuel. It runs about anything including butane canisters but is relatively heavy. It is a real high quality stove though with almost no plastic parts. It turns out that butane canisters are not that hard to come by and white gas is. Here they call it benzene. In Colombia butane canisters were next to impossible to find and benzena blanco or white gas was also hard to find even though that is a common paint thinner.
Seats I am going with a Brooks Flyer which weighs a ton but I am not going to pedal for four months all day long with a sore ass. The most common touring seat we saw in Patagonia no matter where people came from was a Brooks B17 or similar. A Flyer is just a B17 with springs. Laurie is taking a Rideout Carbon Comfort which we both have used for long rides and really like. We fought over who got to use it on the last tour we did. I use one on my folding bike. The only reason for me not touring with it is that I don't like the comments about it being a "girls" saddle and it is unusual looking. Real male cyclists wouldn't use one of those so I have to protect my self concept. Laurie could absolutely care less about what anybody thinks about things like that.
Here is the thing with seats for touring. Typically on a road bike or mountain bike you have the seat higher than the bars. Touring the vast majority of tourers prefer to be more upright with the seat about even with the hand position. This changes how your parts fit on the seat quite a bit. Just try it. If you bend way over at the waist like a racer, it totally changes the contact points. Plus if you are sitting more upright you put more of your weight on the saddle instead of your arms. Yet another reason for a different saddle for touring is that you tend to move around a lot less than mountain biking or road riding for fitness, where you are out of the saddle a lot more or if you are cranking reasonably hard the seat is more of a stabilizer and you do not put all your weight on it. Standing on the pedals when fully loaded is hard on the bike and just does not work very well. Typically when standing on the pedals you are moving the bike side to side for added power. So you need a seat for prolonged sitting and sight seeing. Yeah it will most likely not be as racy looking as one a real cyclist uses but having a sore ass all day is a really high price to pay for that.
Sleeping Bags Seeing as how the climate is not too much different than the Pacific Northwest we are going to bring what we use here and that is lightweight summer down bags. The summer bags rated to not much below freezing pack down real small and weigh around two pounds. If we need more than that we wear long underwear and fleece tops along with hats, socks and gloves. We have used summer down bags at 12,000 feet in the Sierras when water in pots froze and been OK. A real warm bag rated to zero takes up a lot of room and weighs a lot more. That is one of the big ways to save weight for ultralight backpacking. People get too hung up on those numbers like if it gets colder than the bag is rated for they are going to die. If you have to be real toasty warm all the time backpacking or bike touring are probably not good hobbies for you. We used light down bags in a tour around the Kona and they worked out ok for that even though some of the areas are much wetter than others. If it was too wet and rainy we did not camp typically both in South America and Kona.
Here are a few random things I would do differently on the next trip.
I think I would opt for the handle bars that curl up rather than the stock drop bars on the Surly LHT
The center pull brakes on the LHTs are pretty week so i would try to find something else.
I would have opted for all pvc type panniers as they would be easier to keep clean. The side pockets on the ortlieb cordura ones were hard to use although Laurie didn't have a problem with them.
A front shock would be a big plus for the Carratera Austral if you can get your weight down to where you did not need front panniers or can figure out how to mount them on front forks with shocks. Some people we have met have done that.
The little tent was fine for us
It is interesting to compare set ups with other touring bikers and have discussions about that. Of course the guys are more interested in that than the women are most of the time.
After a couple of months of touring much of it on gravel roads the ortleib panniers finally had a latch break on a slow speed crash. I would bring some replacement hooks next time as they are only plastic after all.
No need to bring typical brake pads as you can get those anywhere.
In tropical climates only i would skip the tent and bring a hammock with mosquito net and if that did not work rent a room. I also would skip the sleeping bag but bring a sheet of some sort.
We did bring some portions of old foam pads for sitting and laying on to take breaks and I would do that again.
Next trip i would strongly consider taking some sort of real easy to use small portable voice recorder to record random thoughts and observations about things that are easy to forget when it comes time to write about them especially if something else newer is front and center.
If you need to put together various pieces of touring gear
for flying but do not want to buy or have to deal with luggage there are some
options. One is we noticed in Colombia a lot of people on buses with these
large rectangular bags with zippers made
out of tarp like plastic material in a variety of colorful prints and sizes.
Those can be had for as little as $3 dollars each. The handles will hold up if you are careful but the baggage guys are not, so i would suggest putting a rope around it as a back up handle and something to better put the luggage tag onto.
Also common, in even small towns are grain and produce bags
which are like gunny sacks only in a woven plastic like material. Those are
also real cheap and you can tie rope or bungees around those. The airports and maybe elsewhere also have
these machines that wrap your luggage in plastic which you could conceivably do
to some panniers to make them into one bag but that is more expensive than the
above mentioned options and you just have to throw the plastic away. You will not look like a savvy frequent
business class flyer with the grain bags or the Kresge quality tarp bag luggage, however. The ones we got in Bogota were
polka dotted but they will be easy to spot at baggage pick up.
Another option is a good old cardboard box with string tied going around both ways. To beef it up for moisture and rough handling wrap lots of packaging tape or similar around it in case the cardboard fails.
I just got an email from a Patagonia tourist whose Brooks saddle managed to not be in his bike box when he got home. I got some solid single strand plastic coated copper electrical wire from a hardware store (ferreteria in Spanish) and wired all my loose parts to the bike inside the box. That wire is very cheap insurance. You can also take the wire and secure the chain around the largest chain ring so the chain ring does not eat through the box when they drag it around at the airport. I now lock my Brooks saddle to the bike, as a well broken in one is priceless asset.
Here is a general observation. From what I could tell the people who described the most flats and mechanical problems were the ones that were the most heavily loaded. (Ever notice how your really big friends are always having problems with their gear not holding up?) We never had spokes break or much need to even tighten spokes. When Laurie had her back tire bent back into shape after being hit by a car she still did not have any spokes break and some of them on one side were really tight. I attribute that to the light loads. (We changed that wheel out in Bogota.) I was reading some South American blog by a couple touring on a tandem bike and the tire and wheel problems they had were astounding. That is twice the loaded weight on the same wheels. So this is just one more reason to skip your favorite car camping tent and the cast iron fry pan that you can't live without. You would be surprised at the can't live without items that bike tourists bring. Also I would advise against being prepared for every possible contingency mechanical or otherwise. Take a deep breath and let it go - you can't bring it all and dealing with odd problems is part of the adventure.
Another option is a good old cardboard box with string tied going around both ways. To beef it up for moisture and rough handling wrap lots of packaging tape or similar around it in case the cardboard fails.
I just got an email from a Patagonia tourist whose Brooks saddle managed to not be in his bike box when he got home. I got some solid single strand plastic coated copper electrical wire from a hardware store (ferreteria in Spanish) and wired all my loose parts to the bike inside the box. That wire is very cheap insurance. You can also take the wire and secure the chain around the largest chain ring so the chain ring does not eat through the box when they drag it around at the airport. I now lock my Brooks saddle to the bike, as a well broken in one is priceless asset.
Here is a general observation. From what I could tell the people who described the most flats and mechanical problems were the ones that were the most heavily loaded. (Ever notice how your really big friends are always having problems with their gear not holding up?) We never had spokes break or much need to even tighten spokes. When Laurie had her back tire bent back into shape after being hit by a car she still did not have any spokes break and some of them on one side were really tight. I attribute that to the light loads. (We changed that wheel out in Bogota.) I was reading some South American blog by a couple touring on a tandem bike and the tire and wheel problems they had were astounding. That is twice the loaded weight on the same wheels. So this is just one more reason to skip your favorite car camping tent and the cast iron fry pan that you can't live without. You would be surprised at the can't live without items that bike tourists bring. Also I would advise against being prepared for every possible contingency mechanical or otherwise. Take a deep breath and let it go - you can't bring it all and dealing with odd problems is part of the adventure.
