Walking the Wall

The hipbelt buckle on my backpack broke. As we were leaving Mr Hou’s, I cinched the belt up tight, my belly fought back, and the plastic buckle snapped under the weight of years of beer, pizza and potato chips.

Anyone who’s carried a backpack knows what this means. The hipbelt, together with the backpack’s suspension, transfers the weight of your pack to your tailbone and from there to your legs. A properly functioning hipbelt is what enables you to carry 15 kilograms for 25-30 kilometres a day in reasonable comfort, and what makes it possible to carry 20-25 kilograms with a fair degree of effort but no pain.

If you don’t have a functioning hipbelt, all of that weight sits on your shoulders. If you tried to carry 15-25 kilograms hanging from your shoulders you would quickly develop intolerable back pain.

In other words, without a hipbelt that works, you don’t have a backpack.

After a few minutes of me ranting and raving, we settled down to figure out what we could do. We tried super glue, melting the plastic together with our camp stove, and throwing rocks. Nothing worked.

So we pulled out the big guns (i.e. our Swiss Army knife). We cut up the hipbelt – permanently ruining it – and substituted a smaller buckle from another part of the pack. It was a bit flimsy but it got us back on the trail.

Destroying my backpack in order to save it

The smaller buckles lasted only three days, and I broke three of those. Still, our patch job allowed us to walk while Joe Eberling and George Jackson at Wild Rampage outdoor equipment distributors in Shanghai shipped us some fantastic replacement packs. Thanks to their quick work, we lost only two days’ hiking time.