Before a bar-tailed godwit leaves Alaska for New Zealand, a flight of more than eleven thousand kilometres over open ocean with nowhere to land, it gets fat, and then it shrinks its own stomach and gut. There will be nothing to eat for a week or more, so the kitchen is the first thing it leaves behind, and the room goes to fuel. Most packing advice is about what to bring. The godwit’s is about which part of yourself you won’t be needing on the way, and being sure enough to leave it.