Travellers' Checks | The ultimate travel checklist: from a 19th-century guide that calls for opium to today’s apps

Quite possibly the first guide book to include practical travel information as well as sightseeing advice, Travels on the Continent: Written for the Use and Particular Information of Travellers(1820) was penned by English author Mariana Starke to help British tourists discover a newly peaceful, Napoleon-free Europe.

Besides detailed tips on budgeting, food and accommodation, it featured a rating system using exclamation marks rather than stars, and provided an extensive and illuminating packing list. This included basic necessities such as a room lock, tablecloths and napkins, as well as “portable soup”, Iceland moss, Walkden’s ink-powder, sulphuric acid, pure opium, mustard, cayenne pepper,
a silver teapot and a good many other sundries.

Almost 60 years later, in 1878, British writer Isabella Bird travelled through Japan on her way to Hong Kong with an India-rubber bath, a folding camp bed, “my own Mexican saddle and bridle, a reasonable quantity of clothes, including a loose wrapper for wearing in the evenings, some candles, Mr. Brunton’s large map of Japan, volumes of the Transactions of the English Asiatic Society, and Mr. Satow’s Anglo-Japanese Dictionary”.

While Bird was exploring Japan, Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island (1883), spent 12 days walking through southern France, on a journey made famous in one of his first travel books, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). His packing list included a self-designed, custom-ordered sleeping bag (before such were commercially available) fashioned from a railway blanket, “a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg beater and a considerable quantity of black bread and white”.

Modern travellers, of course, are usually less encumbered, and have the luxury of packing-list apps for reminders and suggestions. Offering something more old-fashioned (though without India-rubber baths or legs of mutton), Lonely Planet is publishing a new Packing List. Perhaps a useful companion to 2016’s How to Pack For Any Trip, it contains 80 tear-off sheets and features all the essentials required for various kinds of overseas travel.