It is also the first pack system with a detachable day-pack that I haven’t hated.

Background

Packing for travel is two parts psychological, one part physical and one part intelligent design. “The things you own end up owning you in the end,” a wise but violent man once quipped.

When left to my own devices, I bring (on average) six pounds of “stuff” that I have no use for and by journey’s end have discovered I’ve not used or touched at all. Clothes, toiletry supplies, camera lenses, et cetera, et cetera. That means the two mile death march to find a hostel with vacancy, or mad dash to catch the last ferry/bus/plane is encumbered by 6 additional pounds of crap whose sole function is to bog me down.

The inefficiency of it all is enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Thus, I’ve concluded my packing system needs to be geared towards containing the aforementioned packing tendencies while maximizing agility and accessibility. This criteria demands a pack that limits you to less than 40 liters (or 2440 cubic inches) of room.

The concept basically forces you lug less than 30 pounds of equipment on your back. I’ve found 20 pounds is optimal for my purposes. Longer trips (or short trips, for that matter) mandate different load outs, but the concept of traveling light is key.

The Bag

The North Face Backtrack 50 was North Face’s answer to numerous travel bags marketed toward the “world traveler,” a niche market currently dominated by Eagle Creek. These are bags not designed for scaling Everest but rather designed for a great diversity of environments — airport hopping, camping in the rain, long bus trips and withstanding rough treatment from handlers unconcerned with your bag’s safety.

I discovered the Backtrack 50 after a disastrous trial run with my old top-loading backpack I’d been using as a holdover from my Boy Scout days.

The bag consists of a side loading compartment that contains absolutely no dividers or constraints, allowing you the freedom to pack as you see fit. This freedom is only constrained by the limited packing space permitted. The main bag gives you 2250 cubic inches (37L) while the detachable day pack provides 800 cubic inches (13 liters).

The bag’s flap has two zippered compartments on the inside and outside. I usually keep my notebook and a language book in the inner compartment. The outer pocket, substantially smaller than the inner, contains my Petzl Zipka Plus Headlamp for easy access.

Additionally, the bag features a hidden pocket for a wallet or passport tucked under an inseam on the back of the pack.

The bag can be converted from a backpack to a large shoulder bag thanks to the inclusion of a secondary flap that covers up the main straps. A shoulder strap is included — and despite the clasps being made out of heavy duty plastic they’ve withstood 2 years of rigorous use. Lastly, attached to the secondary flap is a rain cover that shields the bag from the elements — weather or airport conveyor belts.

The suspension system is top notch; and is by and away the most comfortable backpack I’ve worn to date. The Tubular 6061 V Frame gives the pack a comfortable shape while keeping the frame light whether its strapped on your back or swinging by your side. The air mesh lining provides amazing comfort and ventilation.

When packed correctly, the Backtrack 50 allows you maximum agility for navigating crowded roads when you’re in a hurry. As someone who hates acquiescing to the flow of the crowd (which you are consigned to do with a large bulky bag), this measure of freedom is simply priceless.

Durability

Two years of use have given my bag a few superficial scars from being checked in at airports. (Yes, it is carry-on size for those leery of checking in bags.) Structurally the bag is in the same shape as it the day I received it from Moosejaw. There is no fraying or tearing at the seams. The heavy duty zippers (fully lockable, of course), and the inclining shielding them, are a joy to use.

The day-pack detaches with ease. Even when fully loaded, the day-pack fits smuggly against the main bag. When the day-pack is detached, the straps holding it reattach to the main bag in a very streamlined manner through a series of secondary holding clips normally hidden when the day-pack is on.

The secondary flap and rain jacket works as advertised. Although I would note that the first couple of times you use it will inevitably take longer to cover the bag either into a shoulder bag or protect it from the rain.

The aforementioned plastic clips on the detachable shoulder strap remains the only part I have any concern with. I predict it will be the first thing that breaks; although when that will be I cannot say. I originally predicted it would break a year ago and it hasn’t yet. When I use the bag as a carry-on, I always have it in shoulder bag mode.

Final Assessment

The North Face Backtrack 50 has met every expectation I had when I first forked out $250 for it back in 2007. It’s a lean, agile system that enables you to travel fast and hard with minimal maintenance. It is a simple pack lacking that lacks a lot of frills of competing bags.

Many will find its limited cargo capacity a drawback, however for those who enshrine traveling light as a virtue will be hard pressed to find a similar pack system that surpasses the Backtrack 50. Ultimately, it is simplicity in design and quality in construction that makes the Backtrack a 50 a success.

For the past three months, its been my pleasure to be instructed in one of the world’s most important languages by individuals who love their discipline, and more importantly love their jobs.

谢谢, 大家！非常感谢你们给我一个美好的夏天。

For my tribute, here’s a small series of portraits featuring the teachers and my classmates in action over the course of our field trips.

Second time back to Summer Palace (Yi He Yuan) and once again I’m none the wiser. Throngs of people, high heat — what do you expect from Beijing in July?

This trip was an outing sponsored by my language school. I about dodged out of it but my classmates managed to convince me to alter my plans. As per the last outing, my teachers had the customary homework sheets ready for me to interrogate the unsuspecting masses with.

Yi He Yuan really is a massive complex with a lot of imperial history behind it. Destroyed by Western forces, rebuilt by the infamous Empress Cixi and today contains more people than your average Canadian province.

The English name is more of a nickname than anything and originates from the fact that Cixi used the palace predominately in the summer due to the (slightly) lower temperature of the area.

This time around I managed to get to Su Zhou Jie — as the school fronted the additional ticket price needed for entry. It is an unusual spot that made for some nice photographs. Additionally, it started raining which further enhanced the ambiance (chiefly by scaring the masses of tourists away).

Su Zhou Jie was originally meant for one of Emperor Qianlong’s concubines, whom legend has it grew so homesick that the Emperor relocated a sampling of people/family/friends from Su Zhou Province so she could always have a nearby sanctuary of sorts.

Later, it became a retreat Chinese royalty used to sample the everyday life of “lesser peoples.”

I love Beijing for its virulent growth.

You won’t find a city with as many construction cranes dotting the skyline. As others have said before, it is the fast changing nature of the city that makes Beijing a place unlike any other. For its beauty and the scars it took to make it what is is — and is becoming — I wanted to share a few of my photographic observations.

Here is a short pictorial of how the city’s looked through rain, darkness, smog and sunshine this past summer.

Friday was a much welcomed reprieve from our normal class schedule, or so we thought. Our teachers planned an excursion to 大觉寺 (Da Jue Si) — a thousand year-old temple located about 1.5 hours outside of Beijing.

Their goal was to advance our exposure to Chinese culture and customs.

Da Jue Si, like every other temple in China, is a quaint little place, lovingly maintained and charges an entrance fee bordering on extortion. And yes, they “prohibit” visitors from taking photographs of sacred Buddhist statues, artifacts, architecture and everything else of remote interest.

Call me sacrilegious, but it is a hard thing to respect predominately Buddhist sites that ask for respect while shamelessly pleading for money. Sure, it is fine to ask people to avoid photography (even sans flash) but at the same having a big money collection jar (And no, I’m not speaking about the separate and much smaller prayer offerings) prominently featured at the base of the statue strikes me as a strange double standard.

Regardless, the tour and lunch was enjoyable. It wasn’t until afterwords we discovered school is school no matter the venue. Each of my teachers had prepared a homework sheet consisting of a series of questions I required to ask Chinese visitors.

The end result was a genuine fiasco, with most temple visitors getting smart and turning around and walking in an opposing direction from the dreaded white foreigners. But it was a potent learning experience, albeit an uncomfortable one. My hearing and speaking abilities improved — and reminded me of how rare outside of class I speak to real Chinese people.

As for these photos, I leave it to your capable imaginations to come up with some plausible reason for their existence: 

One final trivia note, Da Jue Si has a famous (and equally old) tea house many Chinese people flock to. Originally, I was to ask the waitresses how long the tea house had operated for, however I mistranslated the question into “What time each day does the tea house open and close?”

The answer, of course, is 11:00am-11:00pm every day. Rain or shine.

Right, so by now you know that Faye works at a Montessori Kindergarten.

Periodically, I come to visit in order to a.) see her in her place of work and b.) take photos of her children for scrap-booking purposes. I enjoy the opportunity mainly to see her daily life in action (a career much different than my own) as well as contribute a little something to the organization.

I’ve become such a common figure that I’m now well acquainted with her boss, fellow teachers and assistants. They’re intriguing people — but then again it takes a special type to move half-way across the world just to teach kindergarten while making an able life for yourself.

Montessori is a unique teaching philosophy. The gist of it is, in a nutshell, enabling children to be independent in an environment designed to maximize their interests and curiosity. As the promotional poster observes, “The best time for a child to learn is when he/she wants to,” or my personal favorite, “What do you mean I cannot touch? Touching is the way I learn.”

Responsibility is a key concept — children prepare their own snacks, and must clean up (to the best of their ability) their own messes when accidents occur. And boy they happen.

The school is a warm environment. I envy the kids (normally between 2-6 years of age) for the experience. It is structured but not in a way that gives you the feeling the kids are being denied their childhood or having too much knowledge forced upon them at such a young age.

Anyway, here is a few select images from Faye’s class:

On a personal note, I must note that it is indeed very hard to take respectable shots of the entire classroom without having the quality feel “snapshot’ish.” Wide-angle lenses do not remedy the situation. Tight-in or panned out, it’s a struggle to capture the “big picture” in a confined environment.

Further, working with young children is a keen reminder how intimidating my Cannon 70-200mm L lens is to many people. Undeniable image quality yes, but it’s a lot to have shoved in your face.

I took more than an hour before the children were quasi-comfortable with my presence.

(Or maybe they’re just better judges of character than we “adults” give credit for.)

In many ways, I might as well have been in Siberia watching it on a small black and white TV screen. I didn’t fling myself into the mob at Tiananmen Square and witness the fireworks during the opening ceremony. And I certainly didn’t crowd in at Wangfujing to watch it on the big screen.

Instead, I went out with friends, hit the Saddle, and came back to watch the opening festivities at home.

And then I went to the light-weight and light heavy-weight boxing matches the next day. A friend hooked me up with two tickets. The other “cool” venues were out of my price range. So all in all, I got to watch 21 matches.

Russia whooped on Sweden. The US beat out Argentina. The Irish kicked ass because, well, they’re Irish and this is boxing. And China barely won against some small country I can’t even remember.

(The Chinese guy wasn’t good, but the People carried him to victory. He had no choice but to somehow win. For that matter, the People carried all of the Chinese athletes to victory with a force I haven’t before witnessed in my life.)

But anyway, boxing was fun until I got bored and uncomfortable sitting in chairs designed for someone two feet shorter than me.

That’s it really.

All attempts at politicizing the games aside, the Beijing games went off flawlessly. The plan was sound and the people rose to meet the occasion with a sense of diligence and honor rarely seen.

I was impressed. The sincere kind of impressed, not the one laced with cynicism and the word “but.” And this from a guy who hates pageantry and “feel good” events.

And if you were to press me further, I would have to say the 2008 games were most remarkable because for the first time in several hundred years, the Chinese people, as a whole, had something to be genuinely happy about.

Something to be proud of that wasn’t tainted or contaminated. Something they earned for themselves in the wake of rebellion and unforgiving natural disasters.

To understand the Chinese mentality, you only had to watch the opening and closing ceremonies.
No one stood out. There were no individuals. Instead, there was a force of people moving in synchronized coordination to accomplish something grandiose.

That was China moving at its best. It is also China’s strength and its most staggering weakness.

And in the coming years, I’ll be keen to to see if they’re able to keep their footing together.

Right, so Singapore is impressive. Darn impressive.

I’ve been on the small island nation of 4.6 million people for around a week. I don’t have any great pictures to share. It’s like the city is one big polished super mall. Really sleek, shiny, always something to grab your attention but nothing that really stands out because everything stands out.

Crime is low, but as propaganda posters explain, that doesn’t mean there isn’t crime so watch out and report any suspicious individuals.

Tax rates are high. But you actually see what the money is spent on and what benefits it gives society. It’s accounted for and well spent. It’s visualized everywhere.

Military service? Compulsory. Drugs dealing? It’s a bullet in the head.

Public transportation is one of the most flawless systems I’ve ever had the pleasure of nitpicking. Even basic buses have accurate ETAs updated in real-time.

Everything is run in this city like a well time clock powered by a fusion reactor for no apparent reason.

It’s just beautiful.

It’s authoritarian, maybe a little autocratic, but the vision of this place, the scope is completely unrivaled except when you comprehend that the people behind this place have actually already accomplished what you think it’s going for.

Oh. So. Cohesive.

Singapore is the ultimate city-state that exists on the face of this planet.

Moreover, the amount of ethnic groups that co-exist peacefully is inspiring. They may not interact that much and there’s little to no talking on buses and trains, but that’s human nature.

Humans find their own kind and build communities around one another. Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Taoist, Indian, White, Chinese, Maly, whatever.

That doesn’t mean we have to be mean to one another and crap the place up.

Singapore doesn’t just work, it’s deadly efficient. Think of it as lethality in a bottle labeled “KICK ASS” with hand grooves on the side so you don’t accidentally drop it in case you’re hands are coated with oil for no apparent reason. And these bottles are sold by the millions thanks to supremely clean (bordering on sterile), stylistic marketing techniques.

No, that shouldn’t make any sense, but now, now you should be able to grasp the concept I’m alluding to.

For all of its splendor, though, Singapore is far from being intuitive. It’s structure is put together logically and concisely, but it’s missing that magic that lets you know what to expect one street up or how to develop a feel for navigation.

To give you an example, when you’re looking for the MRT (Singapore’s subway/train system) you know how to go about finding it. And when you turn that corner and get to the entrance you stop and go “Huh, I guess it makes sense.” And it does, but it doesn’t entirely click either; like it’s missing some unknown tangible.

That’s because Singapore is a really elaborate puzzle that’s painstakingly put together — except all the pieces are square with identical connectors and receivers. Yet the pieces are somehow placed at random intervals that has no specific ordering to which receiver goes where, you just have to remember it as you go.

Those picky observations aside, the bottom line is that you must applaud this society for what they’ve built and the manner in which they continue to thrive.

Vision realized — and yet it causes me pause to contemplate how long has it’s been since my people found one and made it happen.

On Tuesday, Faye and I were sitting in Monty’s Steakhouse having dinner with two friends. Monty’s is in Shanghai. We had stopped there for 12 rainy hours before our flight to Southeast Asia took off.

Before I get into that, let me back up a little bit.

Shanghai has always been one of those nebulous places that occupies something of an apathetic position bordering on contempt in my mind. I think of it as excessively trendy, a haven for old acquaintances I’d prefer never see again, et cetera.

It’s funny how we build up places in our minds and in turn warp our perspectives. We read a little in Lonely Planet, listen to friend’s stories, stalk photos on Flickr and formulate reasons to like or not like a place before ever setting foot.

Or more acutely, which places to put resources into visiting and which places to not.

And Shanghai is one of those places that we know all about without ever setting foot there. We know the feel, the smell and the texture of its substance. The layout is always jenga’d differently than what we construct in our psyche, but the conclusion is the same.

At the end of the day, I had seen the People’s Square, ridden on a mag rail that traveled 430 kilometers per hour, stopped by a couple of museums, admired the European-inspired building architecture, trekked up Nan Jing Road and explored the Bund.

Carpe diem and all that jazz.

In a nutshell, Shanghai is a more refined version of Beijing with a nice ocean view and slightly more infrastructure. It’s also less dusty and the Shanghaise have narrower faces than Beijingers.

So back to Monty’s. In a profound way, Shanghai was Monty’s to me. Or rather, Monty’s was Shanghai, whichever. It was the very last thing we did. And it ended up causing us to miss our train back to the airport, prompting an expensive taxi scramble to make the flight in time.

(For your reference, the last mag rail train going back to Pu Dong International Airport is 9:30pm sharp.)

These are the “amusing in hindsight” details.

When we arrived at Monty’s, we were soaked in a pungent mixture of rain and sweat. This important to note up-front because Monty’s is strictly a black tie affair. Not a tech t-shirt, green travel shorts and Teva’s kind of place. Even more so when you’re soaked to the bone.

But when your friends are the temporary managers, exceptions can be made.

For about two hours we caught up with our friends Xiawu and Patrick and enjoyed live renditions of Johny Cash music. And the food defies all adjectives known to man.

(Let’s also say that quality of what you’re getting far exceeds its price. If you’re in town, find it.)

And so we sat out of place perfectly in place — if that conjures any sense at all.

And perhaps that’s what travel is evolving into for me. Faraway places no longer seem so far away. Exotic food is a nice accent, but hardly inaccessible. But catching up with people in a faraway location with both good conversation and good food on the tip of your tongue is definitively enjoyable.

There’s other accents, too.

Details like “missed trains” and “soaking wet from the rain” are afterthoughts that shape the real experience of holding my girlfriend’s hand as we gleefully walk in a downpour with touts everywhere trying to get us to buy an umbrella and sign us up for their safe, dry world.

These are profound moments difficult to express in writing. They make life extraordinary, in my opinion.

And that’s exactly how I spent my night in Shanghai.

Update: For those wondering, the psychedelic tunnel pictures are long exposures of the Bund “amusement park” ride from one side of the harbor to the other.

They are, to my great joy, a little on the abstract side.

Faye and I headed to Beijing’s art district for something of an usual photo shoot. The style is hard to put your finger on — it’s part Goth/Emo/Scene. The simple reason for this odd combination was that we simply didn’t know what we were doing and just wanted it to be different.

Different is the key word.

As a photographer, not to mention as a person in general, we get caught up in our own patterns of redundancy. Doing the same thing unconsciously all through our lives. Ignoring the trends, failing to see the waste.

Sometimes you have to break out of those patterns with blunt prejudice.