About this time last year, I bought an Osprey Farpoint 40, every travel blogger’s favourite backpack. I bought it because I didn’t really have a good-ish bag for shorter trips, that could be easily and conveniently transported, and also because I saw far too many people raving about it for a really long time.
So. The Farpoint 40 is a 40 litre suitcase, perfect for hand luggage with a good set of backpack straps hidden in the back. You can zip them away behind a panel to make a streamlined suitcase more suited to baggage carousels, you can attach a long shoulder strap to wear as an oversized shoulder bag or carry it by the top or side handles, or you can unzip those straps. I’ve had bags that turn into backpacks before and the straps always feel like an afterthought. They’re just thin nylon straps, like the kind on your schoolbag but this is Osprey, so these are good straps. They’re nicely padded, they’re adjustable absolutely everywhere and there’s a padded waist strap as well, equally adjustable. This all means it’s very easy to carry.
So far I’ve carried mine to Rīga, Paris, Stockholm, Cyprus, Glasgow, Edinburgh and assorted two-day trips to London. It’s going to Kyiv at the end of the month and to Innsbruck in December. I’ve add time to develop thoughts on it.
First is that yes, it’s very easy to transport. With all those straps and all those adjustments, I can wrap it around my body until it becomes one with me, which helps distribute the weight and that’s nice. I can hide all the straps away and put it in the hold without fear of it getting caught and damaged. It fits under the seat on a plane (except Flybe’s tiny Q400s and then it’ll fit if you don’t have anyone sitting next to you) and it’s easier to carry down the aisle of said plane if you fold the straps away and carry it like a briefcase.
My London Boss looks covetously at it whenever I take it to the London office, which I do because I can fit overnight stuff and my laptop in it. It’s an Osprey and it’s a handy bag and it’s relatively expensive, so it’s virtually a designer bag. I wish it wasn’t in that dark greenish-grey shade, though. I’d much rather it was black or just outright grey. Even just plain green, at a push. The lining is lime green and I quite like that. I’d choose bright orange if I was designing it myself but the lime green is eye-catching and I can more than live with it.
And the pockets? Well, I like the front pocket for storing my plastic bag of liquids plus any other small things I want to get at quickly and easily. The middle pocket is good for laptops as long as you haven’t got anything else in there. I only carry my laptop on trips to the London Office so it’s usually full of other electronics, my folder of documents and my book. It doesn’t really feel like it was designed for bulk, though. That pocket is a slim pocket. And then there’s the main compartment. I’ve never really used suitcases so the suitcase layout isn’t something I was desperate for but it does kind of work. I’m more used to digging around in a top-opening backpack so it feels unnatural to lay things out flat, pack things carefully around the edges, compress it all with the straps. But I can’t deny that being able to fold the whole thing open and see it all laid out in front of me is pretty useful. I use the mesh pocket on the other side for used clothes and again, it feels like a pocket designed for flat things.
It also has compression straps to keep the whole thing as small as possible, loops on the outside for hooking things on (I’ve never yet used these) and two mesh pockets, presumably for water bottles, which mostly get compressed by the compression straps. That said, I have stored bottles in them before.
But do I like the Farpoint 40?
Well. Yes, I do like it. I like how easy it is to carry, I like all the carrying options, even if I don’t make too much use of some of the others. I like the suitcase layout. But… it kind of feels heavy. I went to see Queen at the o2 Arena back in July and I took this bag. It contained my phone & charger, toothbrush & toothpaste, hairbrush, underwear, pyjamas and a clean t-shirt. (My sister would fit that in a handbag.) And even though the suitcase compartment was visibly almost empty, it felt like a reasonably full bag. I also don’t feel like it swallows as much stuff as it could. I have a 40ish litre hiking bag and a 40ish litre Wet & Dry Kitbag and while neither is quite as short-break-friendly as the Osprey, I feel like I can pack more into both of them. I guess it comes down to the separate compartments and the fact that to reach full capacity, you kind of have to puff out the Osprey by almost over-filling it, rather than dumping everything into one big section. I took a lot of stuff to Edinburgh in 2017 in the Kitbag, including a second pair of shoes, and I later tried to replicate that with the Osprey, only to find it didn’t really fit. To be fair, it didn’t really fit in the Kitbag either. I know there would have been prodding and rolling and manipulating of contents to force the zip closed and it was too much stuff, which is why my shoulders hurt and why I marched through Edinburgh mentally yelling “GET OUT OF MY WAY I CAN’T PHYSICALLY GET OUT OF YOURS BECAUSE THIS BAG IS TOO HEAVY TO MANOEUVRE IN!!”, which is something I’ve never felt with the Osprey. Which might be because of it being easy to carry or it might be because it’s harder to get that much stuff into.
(I readily admit to being an overpacker. Two years ago I went to visit Tom, going to Manchester and Liverpool and spending one night away from home. Tom attempted to be a gentleman and picked up my bag as we left a rooftop bar, only to be horrified by the weight I was hauling around – for less than 48 hours! And I know perfectly well how too-much I carried around Iceland on the Laugavegur Trail earlier in the year. And every other trip. That’s not Osprey’s fault.)
Would I recommend the Farpoint 40? I would certainly suggest it. We did a family trip to Cyprus in April where all four of us brought a different hand-luggage bag and there were a few mutterings about the difficulty of pulling the others on their little wheels, particularly on the trek from the shuttle bus into the airport. “Maybe if you had a bag like mine…” On the other hand, I wouldn’t evangelise about it. Yeah, it’s a good bag. It might even be a very good bag. But for me, I think there’s still a little room for improvement. Oh, one thing. I think I have the second generation version and I think the first generation version had a clip in the front for attaching your keys. I wish mine had that because I tend to have to drop them into the laptop slot and they tend to vanish underneath all the other stuff I put in there. A clip would have been really useful. Why did they get rid of that?
Would I buy another? That would depend. I don’t need a second one. Would I buy one to replace the current one? If it dies in the next year, no. For the price, I hope it’s durable enough to last quite some time and if it’s not, then no. I mean, it’s pristine at the moment, so I don’t anticipate that happening. If something else happens to it – if it gets stolen or permanently lost by an airline or anything else that’s not its own fault, then I might well buy another. Possibly in a different colour. I believe they do a red and a light blue and they might even do a real black.
Summary: 4.5 / 5 stars.