Travel camera

Congratulations to the trips you are planning!

I have some experience with backpacking, hiking and bike tours, and I found, that the most important thing is to keep your gear small and light. In film camera times for me this meant a camera with standard macro lens and sometimes one wide angle lens.

Some ideas:

1. With some care I managed to keep my camera dry even in tropical climates like the rainy season in Costa Rica. A good bag is cheaper than a rainproof camera.

2. Start thinking with lenses: the Pana 1,7/20 or the Olympus 1,8/25 are small, have excellent IQ  and are quite fast. You could get a small body, like the GX7 or GM1 or the EM10 - and will get excellent pictures with just this combination. The EPL5 and EPM2 have s great sensor, but a crappy LCD, because the 4:3 pictures come out tiny on the 16:9 screen.

3. If you are content with one fixed focus lens and want even better IQ, you might consider the Fuji X100 or X100S or the Ricoh GR.

4. If you are prepared to sacrifice some IQ for flexibility, take one of the better kit zooms: the 12-32 with the GM1 is supposed to be quite good, also the 14-42II on the GX7 or the 14-42II on the Olympus cameras.

5. For traveling, I also would consider the Canon Powershot G1-X MkI or MkII: big sensor, good zoom lens.

6. Except for wildlife photography you don't need a tele lens. For casual animal pictures, the long end of the kit zooms is ok. But if you are really in for that, I would carry the 100-300.

Have a lot of fun on your trip!

Peter.