What I learned from Costa Rica, part 4

This is about traveling with a tripod.

How do you carry your tripod around? Inside your backpack or outside? One way or another, your tripod would have to be stored inside some luggage bag for the flight because it may not be allowed to be carried as a carry-on on the plane. When you get to your destination though, how should you carry it?

In Costa Rica, I read that theft levels are on the increase. It made me uneasy to carry any camera gears on the outside of my backpack. You are just drawing attention to yourself. If they see a tripod, they might think you have more valuables on the inside of the backpack. So, my tripod was stuffed in my 60L backpack, away from prying eyes, most of the time.

Fully compressed and disassembled (the vertical column can be removed), my OPUS OT-1104BH tripod can fit in virtually any backpack. It's quite small. However, I thought it would be easier to keep the vertical column and the ball head on at all time so I can draw the tripod out of the backpack and use it instantly. My backpack contains my clothes though. It might be easy to draw the tripod out but to re-insert it back into the backpack would be challenging. My solution was to use the box the tripod came in. The box felt bulky but it works really well. The rigid structure of the box reserves space in my backpack so the tripod can easily go in and out of the box whenever I need it.

Two caveats of using the box are: it does take up probably twice as much space as the tripod itself and the double layer of cardboard materials add on more weight. However, the box keeps my clothes and everything else inside the backpack clean and dry from the dirt and sometimes water on the tripod.