How To Secure Your Luggage

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It is funny the subjects one can become interested in. I've found myself over the past couple of months more interested in luggage and while I've written other information on how to choose different types of luggage - today I'm going to talk about a part of luggage we don't like to think about - which is how to secure your luggage.

If you're like me and travel frequently - you will eventually end up in a situation where you lose your luggage. The silliest time I lost my luggage was when I was flying on a regional airline and as we pulled out from the gate we could see our luggage left on the tarmac. The airplane was too heavy to carry the luggage! You might also find out luggage is broken because of accident or damaged during airline transfer.

However, there are tips that you can use when choosing your luggage as well as when you are traveling with your luggage. These are probably better to actually help you on your trip than determining whether to pick a bag with stripes or not.

The most basic knowledge to have is to not to overpack your luggage in the first place. By only packing what your baggage can hold you will reduce the chances of the bags breaking. This is because the number one reason why bags break is because people overpack their luggage. There are smarter ways to travel such as not carrying toiletries that you can buy cheaply at your destination, proper packing technique and leveraging clothing that has extra pockets instead of over-stuffing your bag. You can further strengthen the bag and make it easier to find in the baggage pickup by using a strap around the bag.

The other cause of losing luggage is when they are actually stolen. In most cases this is because people packed valuables such as jewelry or cash in their checked luggage. While you can use locks to protect your luggage these are not a very strong protection - in particular not post 9/11 where the locks must be designed to be unlocked by the TSA. While we like to think that criminals don't have access to the master keys, I think that's being naive. Plus the locks don't prevent someone from using a knife or saw or drill to go through the luggage to rip it open. Instead of carrying valuable jewelry in the luggage - carry it with you in as plain of package as possible. Nobody suspects a plain brown envelope contains valuables - which is why gemstones are often transported that way between stores. So you can use the same trick with your own valuables.

Of course if your luggage has been lost or you want a stronger bag you might want to check out modern pink luggage.

Books Set in China - Five Novels to Read Before You Travel

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With its huge land mass and population China is a country with millions of stories to be told. Luckily for us, some of those stories have been captured in novels. From its colonial past and its decades of communism to the economic power-house it is today, China's many faces are reflected in the pages of hundreds, if not thousands of novels available for us to read. Here are five much-loved titles which will give you an insight into a country which was for so long closed to those from the outside. Before setting off to explore this fascinating country, discover some of what makes it tick with this selection.

'Snow Flower and the Secret Fan' by Lisa See

This is a fast-paced tale of adventure and mystery in 1920's Shanghai as Spanish painter Elvira De Poulain tries to sort out her murdered husband's messy affairs. To survive and pay off her husband's massive debts, she and her teenage niece Fernanda need to decipher the clues in an antique chest to find some lost treasure - before the killers get their hands on it! An entertaining and action-packed way to delve into Chinese culture.

'The Painter from Shanghai' by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Staying with Shanghai, this novel is based on the true life-story of painter Pan Yuliang, the first Chinese woman to paint in the Western style. Born in 1895 and orphaned as a teenager, Yuliang follows her passion to become a renowned and controversial painter. The novel follows Yuliang's life and career as China goes through enormous political upheaval, world wars and invasion by Japan. It is the story of a passionate and determined woman battling to create rebellious art in a country in which it is not accepted.

'Brothers' by Yu Hua

Bring China's social revolution to life with this funny and touching novel of two step-brothers from a small town. Spanning the years from the Cultural Revolution to the country's capitalist reform, it is a cynical look at modern China. As the years progress one brother finds himself lost in the new world, while the other embraces its entrepreneurial spirit, reflecting some of the breadth of response to the country's changes. But while this novel does attempt to tell the story of modern China, it is its memorable, much-loved characters and sharply observed humor that really delights its readers.

'The Vagrants' by Yiyun Li

A brutal and melancholy story which explores the impact of a 1979 execution on the residents of the fictional provincial town of Muddy River. Young female counter-revolutionary Gu Shan's horrific death comes after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and while there is a local protest to clear her name, the government clamps down on this expression of liberalisation. The after effects of the execution travel far and wide on an ensemble cast of characters, and is a reminder of the shadow the Cultural Revolution casts over the country. This is a bleak but powerful read that will remain with you for a long time to come.

'The Concubine's Daughter' by Pai Kit Fai

Spanning three generations and forty years, this novel reveals the stories of an educated woman turned concubine, her daughter and grand-daughter. The book explores the status and role of women in China in the first half of the 20th century, as the characters eventually challenge their fate and seek to forge their own destinies.

It would be a lifelong task to read all of the many novels set in China which are in print today, but hopefully this selection has given you a taste for the rich and rewarding stories that are available for you to explore. Why not allow fiction to carry you further through this wonderful country and its people, even as you explore it in person - from Beijing to Hong Kong, from Shanghai to areas deep in the countryside, from the past into the exciting world of the present.

Suzi Butcher is the editor of http://www.packabook.com/ which makes it easy to find novels set in particular locations. This is a just a taste of the novels she recommends -- visit books set in China for many more. With Packabook's constantly updated selection of travel novels from countries all around the world, you will always be able to choose something exceptional to read.

A Wildly Distorted Account - 30 Days In Sydney by Peter Carey

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Peter Carey's 30 Days In Sydney claims to present a wildly distorted account of a writer's return to a city he knows well. After ten years in New York, the author spends a month in the city he left behind and he records the experience. It's not at all distorted, except interestingly via an essential personal perspective. It's more than a travelogue, less than a memoir, certainly not a guidebook. The form is intriguing. It could pass as a commonplace book, the merely fleshed out notes of an individual's visit to his own past. And the form works well.

The idea, it seems, is to communicate a feel for a place. The result is a collected experience where the personal rubs shoulders with the historical, where memory meets geography, where the past is partly lived again through recollection and the lives of others who themselves have moved on. And all of this takes place in less than sixty thousand words.

Peter Carey's aim of using the ancient elements, fire, air, earth and water, as a thread to bind his impressions, however, simply does not work. The idea appears and then seems to be forgotten for some time. The earth is surely special in Australia, quite unlike anywhere else. And water is everywhere in Sydney, whose harbour is surely one of the world's most beautiful places. Fire certainly formed - and continues to form - this landscape: no Australian needs to be reminded of this. Air, however, did not seem to have its own angle, apart form the author having arrived by plane. Looking back now, perhaps the thread was there, despite the fact that at the time it seemed something of a complication.

Themes apart, 30 Days In Sydney is a delightful read because of the characters that Peter Carey meets, depicts and describes, both the living and the dead, the contemporary and the historical. The mix is unique. The rawness is abrasive, but the sophistication alongside is always breathtaking.

Sydney is the kind of city where multiple cultures coexist. In that it is not unique. But it is also the largest city of a nation that has recently rediscovered an aboriginal identity that is being apologetically sanctified. It's a city where the bar at the opera probably has a poker machine. In Manly, the multi-class seaside suburb, a beautiful person with headphones and roller blades can flash past the open door of an amusement arcade while the police swing band, live in the open air, all in uniform and wearing shades, plays a Glen Miller selection. It's a place where you can be pushed off the sidewalk by a redneck right outside the most utterly twee of art galleries. Such contrasts are all there in Peter Carey's book.

I am semi-retired, living in Spain. I spend most of my time nowadays gardening, cooking, reading, reviewing and writing. I have four books available, two African novels set in Kenya, Mission and A Fool?s Knot, a set of travel stories, Voyagers, and a rugby league book, 50 Of The Best, which I wrote with Martin Offiah. I review almost every book I read in an attempt to clarify what I think about it. It?s these reviews that I post on my blog. Please visit http://www.philipspires.co.uk/