Much of my stuff comes from REI. It's a company that I has a lot of things that can help reduce the amount of luggage that you carry when running around the world.
They go into the issue of new baggage fees and the selection of bags. Domestic flights also seem to have higher fees than the international flights. If you do pick up little tourist treasures, you had better watch the weight. Vietnam Airlines gets into a thing about check in luggage weight. It's 20 kg for flights within Asia, and 30kg at the business level. Not a whole lot of breathing room there.
I was a little heavy with photographic equipment. Also in the case of my summer, I was effectively living out of various bags for 2 months effectively.
So if you are going to try to duplicate the itinerary that was followed, be light. One thing is that I am going to compromise on my photographic equipment next time by going with the Micro Four Thirds system Olympus E-pl 1 Camera with an additional wide angle and telephoto lens. Much of my weight was the traditional Nikon DSLR I had.
