anoisette

Considering how much I’ve harped about packing light and only packing necessities, an entry on packing books might seem a little contradictory. So this suggestion might not work for everyone, but it’s what I did and it worked for me when traveling in South East Asia.

Lazing around on beaches or in hammocks in tropical destinations might sound all well and nice, but the fact is after a day or two, it can get a bit boring. Especially when you’re on some little island with rather little in the way of downtime entertainment (notice the downtime, we all need downtime after a day of swimming/snorkeling/hiking/exploring what have you). No TVs (ok there might be one or two in a restaurant or guest house common area but chances are even so the options of what to watch are pretty limited), and internet is prohibitively expensive and slow because it’s satellite access on old laptops. That’s right about when you may think having a book to read would be nice… So you wander over to the little general store only to find out that the price of that new bestseller book is equivalent to twice what you’re paying for one night’s accommodations.

Throughout my SE Asia travels, I found that books were a pretty valuable commodity. Even well worn second hand books were not very cheap, especially on small out of the way islands. When one is in budget traveling mode, spending that much on books is simply unthinkable. But, with a little bit of planning, you shouldn’t have to.

Before leaving for my trip, I went to the spring rummage sale at the Toronto Zen Buddhist Temple. There, I was able to pick up a bunch of used books for really cheap. I tried to pick small paperback sized books that wouldn’t take up too much space. I was able to fit them all into one of the large ziplock bags I was using for my packing system, minus one that I was currently reading.

And so I began my trip well armed with books, and these books were the seed of the system that my friend and I ended up developing for the duration of our trip. I was lucky that my friend/travel partner is also an avid reader, and we share similar taste in books. The way our system worked was this. I would read one of my books, she would read one of hers, we would trade. So that was great, because right there I could read double the number of books I was carrying.

That worked well, but eventually we were still going to run out of reading material. That is when second hand bookshops came in. My first experience was with a little shop in Thong Sala on the island of Ko Phangan. This is when we realized how expensive (relatively speaking) second hand books were. In fact to my great surprise, I ended up selling one of my books to that shop because I was offered (without any bargaining on my part) considerably (again, relatively speaking) more than I had paid for it.

Anyway, throughout out trip were were always on the lookout for good deals on books. The best way to get new reading material was a 1 for 1 trade, but those weren’t very common. When we did find 1 for 1 trades, they were usually run in guest houses as a service to the customers.

A lot of second hand book shops would offer trades where you would trade your book plus pay an additional amount in exchange for one of their books. Other shops would offer trades of 2 of your books for 1 of theirs. Trading 2 for 1 books wasn’t so bad, because it lightened my bag, but needless to say I was sure glad that I had started the trip with a healthy supply of books.

Sometimes I did just buy books outright. Singapore has some good large bookstores with great selection and reasonable prices. In Ubud, on the island of Bali in Indonesia, there’s the Pondok Pekak Library which fosters literacy in children of the village. They had a good selection of used books for sale, and it was nice to know that a book purchase helped to support the library. They also accepted donations of books. I also found english books easier to come by and reasonably priced in Manila in the Philippines.

Before my trip, I just packed some books because I like to read. I ended up reading a lot more than I thought I would. It was a great way to kill time while waiting for buses or trains, as well as relax on the beach. I expected everything in SE Asia to be really cheap to buy, because that’s what everyone seems to say. But english books are definitely an exception and having a bunch of books to trade helped me stay within my modest travel budget.