Lightweight dog hiking kit for travel

Travelling internationally for hiking trips with a dog is a specific kind of challenge — every gram and every cubic centimetre in your bag matters. The essentials are a well-fitting harness, a collapsible water bowl, and depending on terrain, boots — paw protection on rocky or volcanic ground is genuinely more important than most people realise, and it's harder to source abroad than at home. To point you toward the right packable kit: what breed and size is your dog, what kind of terrain are you typically hiking, and how long are your usual days out?

A Basenji is a great hiking dog — lean, athletic, and not prone to overheating. At 10kg he's light enough that his kit shouldn't add much burden, which works in your favour. A couple of things to nail down before I point you to a specific product: does he have any experience wearing boots, and are you flying carry-on only or do you check a bag? That changes how compressed everything needs to be.

That's the key detail — carry-on only changes things significantly. For the boots, the Ruffwear Grip Trex are the gold standard for rocky alpine terrain and they pack flat, but for carry-on I'd actually steer you toward the Hurtta Outback Boots instead. They're lighter, fold almost completely flat, and for a Basenji's narrow paw they tend to fit better than the Ruffwear anyway. Pair those with the Ruffwear Flat Out Bowl — it's the most genuinely flat collapsible bowl available, about the size of a folded envelope when packed — and a Ruffwear Front Range Harness, which folds down to almost nothing. That three-piece kit fits in a zip-lock bag and covers every scenario you've described.

The Ruffwear Flat Out Bowl, without question. It's the one thing you cannot improvise on trail in Iceland or the Dolomites — you can manage without boots on most surfaces if you're careful with route choice, and a borrowed lead works in a pinch, but a dog that won't drink because you have nothing to offer water from is a real problem on a 6-hour day. The Flat Out Bowl weighs 85g, packs to almost nothing, and is on Amazon UK for around £15. Start there, and it'll change how you think about the rest of the kit.

It's decent, but if fit is your concern with a Basenji's narrow chest, the Hurtta Weekend Warrior Harness is actually a better match. It has a more adjustable chest strap that suits deep-chested, narrow dogs far better than most harnesses do, and it still packs down light. It's around £45–£55 on Amazon UK depending on the size. Order an XS and measure him against the size guide — Basenjis usually sit right on the edge of XS and S with Hurtta, so the measuring step matters.