The Ultimate Water Filtration System – International Travel Tips

I spend most of my life looking for a place for my three young children to pee.

Everybody seems to think that we humans need to drink more water. I only mostly convinced. Or maybe I resist adequate hydration because of the aforementioned bathroom searches that seem to subsume my days. In either case, Holly is convinced that we should all drink water. And so we do.

Chances are, you also probably want to drink lots of water. So, as you travel you either need to carry a reusable water bottle or buy disposable water bottles like they’re going out of style. And if you’re visiting anywhere interesting, you can’t drink the tap water (my apologies to interesting places with drinkable tap water), which tends to push people towards disposable water bottles. 

Have we mentioned our early days buying huge water bottles in Russia? While an excellent way to boost muscle tone while traveling, we eventually figured out there are several drawbacks to prolonged use of the water bottle plan. 

I would like to present another vastly superior option. Perhaps you’ve already guessed what it is (or maybe you read the title), but neither here nor there. It’s a camping water filter. 

Why You Should Filter and Refill

There are so many reasons:

• Cost. The cost of buying disposable water bottles is a slow drain on your travel budget. 
• Carbon. Making a water bottle, filling it, transporting it, and throwing it aways makes the atmosphere cry (recycling helps, but only some).
• Litter. Despite your best efforts, one or more water bottles will be misplaced or blow away. They will eventually end up somewhere sad. Seeing trash strewn across the Gobi Desert will make you tear up right along with the environment.
• Convenience. Whether you are in a hotel, hostel, apartment, ger, campsite, or whatnot, every morning, you can filter and fill your bottles rather than looking for a place to buy water.
• Temperature. A good reusable water can take boiling water–very comforting when it’s cold outside. 

What You Need To Know

You have two choices; you can work with some kind of pump filter or a passive gravity filter. A pump filter will let you fill all of your water bottles in one pass with a certain amount of work. If you go this route, splurge on the fancy ones that work faster and better, it will be worth it in the end. Alternately, you can go the route that we have gone: passive gravity filtration. 

Our current setup is a hodgepodge, but it works ever so well. It is a Sawyer Squeeze filter with a coupling and a collapsible fill bottle. You fill the top collapsible bottle with water, screw the pieces together, and hang it up. Ten minutes later, with no effort on your part, you have a liter of clean, drinkable water. Refill your water bottles and repeat. Remember to set up an extra liter before you go to bed. 

The whole setup cost less than fifty bucks. When you consider it has provided water for a family of five in about a dozen different countries, the value is staggering. When you consider the convenience of leaving one’s lodging each morning with full water bottles and never needing to find some vendor to sell them to us, it’s a great time saver too. When you consider the number of disposable water bottles that never needed to be made or disposed of, it feels pretty good also.