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General Travel Articles -
Shoestring Travel
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 This
is one of the best travel tips that I have yet to share. It is basic,
it will come out quick, it is not ingenious, original, nor complicated.
It may even sound silly.
Here goes: toss aside your shampoo and wash your hair with normal, ordinary bar soap.
It works just as well, for is not shampoo but an over-elaborated bar of soap?
I
have found that using bar soap rather than shampoo leaves my hair just
as clean, lowers the amount of times a week that I have to wash my
hair, and, most importantly, it removes the need to carry around and
purchase shampoo. As any traveler knows, liquids are heavy to carry
around, and, likewise, should be avoided at all costs. Shampoo is
almost always sold in liquid form. Using hand soap to wash your hair
reduces the weight of your pack, and this, above all else, is of
paramount value to those who carry their homes opon their backs.
Shampoo can also sometimes be a little expensive. Two dollars here,
three dollars there add up after a while. So stop weighing yourself
down and wasting your precious travel funds on shampoo: I have found
that it is not a necessity.
My
mother always warned me about washing my hair with bar soap when I was
a child. She said that my scalp will get dried out and so many horrible
things would happen to my hair if I were to do so. I listened to her
for over 26 years. But I ran out of shampoo on a bright sunny day in
Honduras a month ago, and, in a moment of supreme clarity, I picked up
the bar soap that I was washing my body with and scrubbed it all over
my head.
It worked.
In
fact, it worked better. After the first wash my hair felt a little
stiff and weird, but after dozens of washes since then, everything
became equalized. My hair got use to not receiving its regular doses of
sodium laurel sulfate, and it now feels no different using soap than it
did shampoo. Using soap on my hair keeps my head and beard un-itchy and
grease free for over a week at a time. I could not boast this record
with shampoo.
Bar
soap is usually basic. It is made to clean. My hair needs to be clean:
so I scrub away at it with bar soap to no ill effect, and I save a
little money and loose a little pack weight in the process.
So toss out your shampoo, get a big bar of hand soap, and wash your body, hair, and even clothes with it. Go to Wash your Laundry While you Shower
Ubertramp, hand soap deserves not a double, but a triple use bonus
To
curb the jokesters who could possibly discard this travel tip on the
grounds that my lack of hair makes for an unsuitable test subject, I
will have you know that Mira, who has a head sprouting beautiful long
hair, has also chucked the shampoo in favor of bar soap.
Her findings have been the same as mine.
Hurray for simple bar soap!
There is an old axiom that I learned in childhood that goes as follows:
"Something does not become a necessity unless you make it such."
For me, shampoo is not a necessity. Maybe it is for you . . .. I don't know???
Try it, find out.
As always, take this travel tip or leave it. Send me praises or insults.
Walk Slow,
Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
 ---------------------------------------------------
Wade
P. Shepard has
been on a continuous vagabond journey around the world for more
than eight years- nearly 40 countries on five continents. He has
wandered into the outback of Mongolia, lived in a monastery in Tibet,
ate a puppy in China, danced with mystics in India, thought he was a
gardener in Ireland, braved the souqs of North Africa, and got really
lost in Patagonia. Throughout all of this, he has been working
diligently on
his travel blog, Song of the Open Road, at: http://www.openroadsong.com and his website Vagabond Journey, at: http://www.VagabondJourney.com, as well as pawning off various travel articles to unsuspecting magazines for food. |
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