I'll be shooting and travelling around this part of the world for the next 90 days.

Today, well the last 3 days I have been making the journey from Halifax, NS to Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. The entire trip took about 36 hours, 4 flights and thousands of miles. This is not the first long haul flight I’ve done, I’m not George Clooney from Up in the Air, but I have logged a lot of travel experience, so I thought I’d share some advice.

• Get on the plane last. I don’t understand what the rush to get on the plane is? It just means you have to spend more time in that cramped, dry environment. Wait till the very end, get on the plane, then look around for an empty row or a free seat in an emergency exit row. If you are the last person on the plane you’ll end up with the best seats 99% of the time. This trick scored me great seats the entire 36 hours of travel. Had lots of room to move around and sleep.
• Print off a list of all the baggage terms and conditions. With recent terrorist events flights from Canada to the United States have strict rules for what can be carried on. When I arrived at the airport they told me my carry on bags (cameras, laptop, etc) were not allowed. I pulled out the printed rule list, they apologized and allowed me to bring them with me.  These rules are always changing, you can’t expect every employee to know them, but if you know them you’ll save yourself major headaches.
• Bring and empty bottle, fill it with water when you pass through security. They never give you enough water when you travel, planes dehydrate you, stay hydrated, stay fresh, reduce the jet lag.
• Never check your principle camera gear. Things get stolen, lost, broken. While down in Austin my bags got lost with most of my lighting equipment. I had, thankfully had enough gear in my carry on to execute the shot I wanted. It ended up taking United Airlines 2 days to finally get my bags, if I had of checked my gear,  I would have been in a world of trouble scrambling to find rental equipment.