Tribute to a faithful travel companion

Having ignored the absolutely true adage, a stitch in time saves nine, my rucksack lid has needed major surgery to halt the decline of the seams and prevent it coming away in someone´s hand, possibly as it was being lifted onto the roof of a bus. Today it got to crisis stage and I finally had a chance to track down a needle and thread in a hardware shop.

I bought twenty needles, partly because this was the quantity they came in and partly because sewing through two layers of that fake canvas they make rucksacks out of, two layers of waterproofing and, in some cases, a triple reinforced seem, I anticipated it would take about ten needles to repair the twenty or so cm of damage.

Now I know that it´s a funny thing to pick as your first thing to RAVE about when you get to a new country (and let me be clear- I am finding Guatemala enchanting and will no doubt prattle on about that at some stage soon), but these needles were frickin fantastic. Seriously. I didn´t break a single one! You could sew rhino hide with these babies.

My sewing is rough as bricks and rucksack is not pretty but what rucksack is?

I bought my rucksack in Scotland and since then it has flown, bussed, hitched, ferried, trained, trekked, shuttled, cabbed, biked, sailed, hiked, driven, scootered and riden through 20 countries with me. It´s been thrown, slid, hefted, hoisted, dragged, dumped, dropped and pulled by every possible strap, support and grip on it thousands of times.

Its harness had to be replaced after a particularly disastrous attempt to hitch in a national park in Kangaroo island, South Australia, it´s missing one of it´s clips and it is truly truly FILTHY in an ingrained, will never again be clean, kind of way. I think this is its last trip.