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There's a lot of stuff that you can travel with (most of which, unless you're a good editor) won't be used much. The key items on a trip are your clothing, your photo gear, and navigation gear in some form. We cover the photo stuff in a separate page, and GPS and clothing are both sub-items of this page so you can click on the menu item to the left.
Binoculars
A lot of travel companies will have binoculars available for you, but sometimes there aren't enough or the quality isn't what you'd like. Using "public" binoculars will also expose you to the diseases that everyone who touched them before you might have been infected with. I was on a Greenland trip where everyone on the ship caught cold from one traveler. If you need any special capabilities like individual focusing, you will need to take your own along, and I'm a personal believer in always carrying your own with you.
Most people will want to get a non-zoom binocular that is either 8x or 10x and 35 to 50 mm (it may say something like "8x42" which is 8 power, 42 mm objective). Bigger objectives gather more light for dim conditions and generally have a bigger field of view for a given mangnification, but make the thing a lot heavier. Higher magnification brings things closer but narrows your field of view and makes positioning the binocular just right to your eyes more challenging. My personal choice is the Meade 10x42 high-end "Nobel" model; it's not excessively expensive and the optics are really good. Adjust the binoculars, particularly the focusing between left and right eye, when you're on the trip but before you try to use them in earnest. Try the binoculars out if you can, and be particularly sensitive to whether they give you vertigo when you move them around. By the way, many people will feel queasy if they use binoculars on something that's moving a lot, such as a rubber raft.
It's important in cold climates to get binoculars that are nitrogen-filled and waterproof so they won't fog up on you. Condensation inside them is darn near impossible to get rid of. Something ruggedized is nice so if you drop it nothing breaks, but you can also just make sure you don't drop them. I've dropped my pair a half-dozen times and because they're ruggedized I can still use them.
There are image-stabilized binoculars that make it easier to hold 10x or 12x units steady, but these are heavy and very expensive, and I'm not sure they really buy you all that much. Some people will rest binoculars on something to steady them (a bean bag, for example) and that's a better approach in my opinion.
If you'd like to hear a little more about GPS, Click Here for a more detailed discussion!
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