Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffel Bags Reviewed

The Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffels are designed to complement the US brand’s Kiboko camera bags, popular among nature and wildlife photographers. Made from durable X-Pac VX21 material and designed with travel-friendliness in mind, Gura Gear says that the Mara Travel Duffel’s lightweight design can help photographers and other travelers meet strict baggage requirements, such as a 20-lb limit on an internal safari transfer in East Africa or a flight to Antarctica.

As a Gura Gear Kiboko user and someone familiar with baggage restriction woes, I was excited to hear about the development of the Mara Travel Duffel. Now that I’ve had a pair of them for a month, I will detail my thoughts and let you know whether Gura Gura has achieved its goals. As usual, this will be a deep and detailed dive, covering all the bag’s features and comparing them to alternatives on the market.

Disclaimer: Gura Gear provided the Mara duffels for testing. No money changed hands, and they were not allowed to see the content before it was published.

Mara Travel Duffel Specifications

The Gura Gear Mara duffel bags are available in four sizes and four colors. All sizes are available in standard Black, and the 40L and 60L sizes are also available in Pacific Blue, Sahara Tan, and bright Federal Yellow. At review time, images of the colored bags were not available. My 40L and 80L review samples are both standard Black.

Mara Travel Duffel Design and Features

All four sizes of Mara duffel bag share the same features. In this section, I’ll discuss each one. Because it’s easier to photograph on my studio table, I’ll be using the smaller Mara 40L bag for most of the photos in this design and feature discussion.

X-Pac Fabrics

X-Pac is a high-performance, 100% waterproof, ripstop nylon material based on ultralight laminated sailcloth technology. This layered, bonded material is incredibly strong and abrasion-resistant and is available from the US company Dimension-Polant in several weights and thicknesses. The Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffels use X-Pack VX21 for most of the shell, with thicker, even tougher X-Pac VX42 on the base.

X-Pac is expensive, and you should expect to pay a relatively high price for any bag that uses it. Still, it’s an incredible material that enables any bag to be lighter, more weather-resistant, and tougher than a bag that uses a standard high-denier nylon weave.

Gear Access

The bag’s main compartment uses lockable YKK zippers with glove-friendly zipper pulls. The lid slightly overhangs the zipper to provide some weather protection. On the inside of the zipper, a length of bright blue piping runs around the edge of the opening. This trick, borrowed from Gura Gear’s camera bags, gives you a quick visual indication of whether the bag is zipped closed. If you can see any blue, the bag is not closed correctly.

Once unzipped, the lid folds aside to give you unobstructed access to the main compartment’s contents and the bag’s many zippered organizational pockets. Unlike many duffel bags whose interior color matches the often dark exterior color, making finding things challenging, the Mara Travel Duffel is lined with light grey nylon for high visibility. Unless you’ve forgotten which pocket you stored something in, there’s nowhere for things to hide in this bag.

Interior Lid Pockets

Inside the bag’s zippered lid is a pair of zippered accessory pockets. Decked in a light grey nylon mesh, there’s just enough visibility to remind you what you stored in these pockets. Inside the right-hand pocket, you’ll find a key clip and another hidden feature…

Hidden AirTag Pocket

Apple AirTags or similarly sized tracking devices from other brands are great ways to monitor your gear. I hide one in every camera bag in case it gets stolen, and I also keep one in every bag that gets checked in for a flight. It’s great to know your bags are loaded with you on a plane if you’ve just made a tight connection, and should a bag get lost by an airline, you may be able to help them find it if the baggage tags or barcode stickers that they rely on have been lost.

Gura Gear understands the usefulness of AirTags and has been including a hidden AirTag pocket in its camera bags for a few years. This feature now makes its way to the Mara series, where you’ll find it inside the zippered pocket on the inside of the bag’s lid.

Internal Organization Pockets

In addition to the split double pocket on the inside of the lid, every Mara Travel Duffel features four internal mesh organization pockets. The mesh is made from the same high-visibility grey used in the Gura Gear camera bags, and zippers are tagged with lightweight nylon cord in the brand’s signature high-vis blue.

In creating these duffel bags, I was told that internal organization was one area in which Gura Gear wanted to improve upon the traditional duffel bag travel experience. Most duffel bags have a pocket on the inside of the lid, and some have a zippered pocket on the inside at one end. This typical combination usually isn’t enough to organize a traveler’s smaller items.

By offering these four internal organization pockets surrounding the main compartment, plus another four pockets elsewhere in the bag, Gura Gear hopes to reduce your packed weight further by eliminating, or at least minimizing, the requirement for additional organizational bags or pouches.

While this concept certainly works to keep your bag’s weight to a minimum, it requires a certain amount of commitment from the traveler. I usually pack my tech and travel accessories in a Peak Design Tech Pouch and a few Gura Gear Et Cetera cases. Ditching those cases in favor of the Mara’s built-in organization saves me around 1.3 lbs. It’s not an insignificant saving when every ounce counts, but to make those weight savings, you give up the ease of extracting all your tech items in one handy bag that can sit on a desk. Still, it’s just an option. You’re not forced to pack that way, and there are always other uses for those pockets, even if its just for your socks.

It’s also worth remembering that these internal pockets are sized proportionally to the duffel bag. On the Mara 40L, these pockets are a good size for charging accessories and other smaller tech items. On the Mara 80L or 100L, the two largest mesh pockets that run the entire length of the bags are big enough to hold my Peak Design travel Tripod in its padded case, or all your underwear for a two-week trip, saving you the weight of another packing cube.

Exterior Front Pocket

You’ll find yet another pocket on the front of the bag. This pocket uses a weather-resistant YKK AquaGuard zipper, which protects its contents from the outside elements. Notably, the pocket’s exterior and interior are made from X-Pac VX21. Sandwiching the contents of this pocket between X-Pac creates a safe and separated place to store things that may leak during travel, such as sunscreen or larger toiletries, such as shower gel, that may not fit in your DOPP kit.

Shoulder Straps

Another area Gura Gear has tried to improve the duffel bag experience is with its removable shoulder straps. The Mara’s shoulder straps aren’t a lightweight afterthought but a well-padded pair of ergonomically designed straps. As the straps are contoured for your body, they must be installed on the correct side of the bag. To help with this, match the small blue tab on the shoulder strap with the blue tab on the bag.

While these are certainly the most comfortably padded shoulder straps of any duffel bag I have used, it must be said that a lot of duffel carrying comfort (or discomfort) comes from how or what you pack into the bag’s top pocket and main compartment. You can create a reasonably comfortable load if your bag is full of clothes, but no amount of shoulder padding will help if the bag is full of climbing gear or diving equipment. X-Pac is durable and robust, but it’s not thick enough to smooth out hard edges and pointy pieces of gear.

Regarding ease of use, Gura Gear’s CEO Trevor Peterson told me they opted for SR (side release) buckles on both ends of the shoulder straps to make them easier to remove. When duffel bag shoulder straps are too fiddly or time-consuming to remove, people don’t bother, and this becomes the bag’s most likely failure point as straps get caught on conveyor belts and tear them open. Conversely, the Mara duffel’s shoulder straps are easy to remove, and I appreciated this feature even more than the comfortable padding.

While the shoulder straps are comfortable, the lack of a sternum strap is a slight letdown worth noting. A sternum strap is a great way to shift and ease weight on your shoulders, and I will always use one when provided. They are only sometimes included on duffel bags, but when they are, I appreciate it. Since I plan to put many more miles on my Mara’s for long-term durability testing, I may look into the possibility of adding a generic sternum strap from Amazon.

Exterior Lid Pocket

Each Mara Travel Duffle features a large lockable YKK AquaGuard zippered lid pocket that runs the bag’s entire length. When I spoke to Gura Gear’s Trevor Peterson about the bag’s design, I was told that this pocket was designed with a particular purpose. While most duffle bags have removable shoulder straps to prevent them from getting snagged in luggage conveyor systems, few have a place to store the straps once removed. This usually results in unzipping the bag’s main compartment at the check-in desk to stow the straps in an already overflowing part of the bag. The better solution is to store the Mara’s shoulder straps in the top pocket.

Laptop Storage?

If you’re traveling with the Mara 40L as a carry-on bag, you probably won’t remove the shoulder straps. In this case, the zippered top pocket becomes the perfect location for your travel documents and boarding passes, along with smaller quick-access items like a USB cable for charging and your headphones.

Though the Mara 40L’s top pocket is not padded, you could use it for storing a tablet or up to a 13″ laptop, as long as you place the device in a protective sleeve. I had no issues using it to store my 13″ MacBook Air in a neoprene case, but I think it would be a tight fit for a 14″ MacBook Pro. A 15″ or 16″ laptop would have to go into the bag’s main compartment. These larger laptops would fit in the larger Mara 60L, 80L, and 100L lid pocket, but I can’t see anyone wanting to do that for anything other than careful road trip storage. You certainly wouldn’t place anything fragile in that pocket while checking it for air travel.

Top Handle and Grab Handles

You’ll move your Mara duffle longer distances using the shoulder straps, but a good duffel also needs a top handle to move the bag around when the shoulder straps have been removed and packed. A top handle is also helpful in carrying the 40L down the aisle of a plane or lifting any of the Mara sizes short distances onto luggage carts and into vehicles. This may all sound obvious, but some duffels on the market, like the otherwise excellent Mountain Hardwear Expedition Duffel, don’t have this feature.

Carrying Case

The Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffels ship in a carrying or storage case made from mesh and X-Pac VX21. Including a storage case with a soft-side duffel bag is standard in the travel bag industry, but they are often awkward shapes or too small to get the bag into without a fight. As a result, Gura Gear says most other duffel storage bags never get used. I certainly can’t argue with that. I have a bag of duffel storage bags in my gear cupboard, and none have ever been used after the duffel’s first extraction.

You won’t have to work to get your Mara into its storage bag. Just remove the shoulder straps, flatten the duffel, and roll it up. It’ll slip easily into the slightly oversized X-Pac case. Moreover, the carrying cases have been sized to fit perfectly into the Mara as a shoe bag or packing cube for your clothes, and using X-Pac as the case’s primary material has kept them light.

Unless you already have a plethora of favored packing cubes, I can’t see why you wouldn’t re-purpose these carrying cases to help keep things in shape while you travel. I don’t know anyone making X-Pac packing cubes, so these are unique. I do have quite a few packing cubes–I am a big fan of the Peak Design ultralight ones–but I still plan to use the Mara carrying cases for my towel and swim shorts, and perhaps hiking outer layers, as the mesh front panel will be helpful if these are packed slightly damp. If things are very wet, I can carabiner the case to one of the nylon loops on the outside of the duffel.

Mara Sizes – Which Do You Choose?

The Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffel was designed in four sizes: 40L, 60L, 80L, and 100L. The 100L was initially produced in limited quantities as this larger size was predicted to be far less popular. However, initial sales of the 100L model have been better than expected. I expect this larger size to be re-stocked in regular numbers moving forward.

Mara 40L

The 40L Mara has been designed as a carry-on friendly duffel for 1-3 days of gear, and Gura Gear says it complies with most domestic US airlines. With 21″ x 14″ x 11″ dimensions, I found the linear 46″ dimension (H + W + D) may also comply with some international carry-on dimensions, depending on how strict an airline is. For example, Air Canada’s carry-on limit is listed as 21.5″ x 9″ x 15.5″, also totaling 46″ linearly, albeit in slightly different proportions to the Mara 40L.

Everyone should make their judgment calls based on an airline’s guidelines and their past experiences with those airlines. Still, as long as you didn’t pack the bag with bricks, a soft-side duffel should be compressible enough to squish it into the bag sizing cage at the gate. I wouldn’t hesitate to fly internationally with the Mara 40L as a carry-on with any of my usually used airlines.

While testing, I found the Mara 40L the perfect size for a weekend trip when I one-bagged it on a journey to Alaska with my family. As long as you don’t need a lot of specialized equipment for your trip, such as climbing gear, bulky winter gear, or awkwardly shaped sports gear, this is an excellent size of bag for a weekend break with a couple of changes of clothing, a toiletry bag, binoculars, a pair of hiking boots and a camera with a couple of lenses. One-bag travel specialists could stretch its use to a week or more, but most people will be comfortable with the long weekend recommendation.

Another use I often find for smaller duffels like the Mara 40L is as a companion bag on solo road trips. This bag sits on the front passenger seat next to me in my car and organizes everything I might need on a long journey–of which, let me tell you, there are many when you live in the Yukon! It’s very roomy up here in the North.

A standard road trip loadout for me would include binoculars and a spotting scope for wildlife viewing, at least one 2L Nalgene water bottle, InReach satellite messenger, snacks and food, gloves, hat, rain jacket, insulated mid-layer, spotting guide, USB-C charging kit, and a camera with a telephoto lens attached, nestled into the insulated jacket but quickly retrievable when I encounter unexpected wildlife.

The Mara 40L’s wide lid opening makes it an excellent bag for this purpose, and its zippered pockets keep everything organized. Only the more oversized clothing items are left in the central section, cushioning the camera. It’d be an expensive bag to buy for this purpose, but if you’re picking one up for your other travel needs, I highly recommend the Mara 40L for this secondary purpose. Using the Mara 40L as a carry-on camera bag may also be a concept that intrigues existing fans of Gura Gear’s camera bags. I’ll discuss this under its own sub-section later in the review.

Mara 60L

The Mara 60L measures 25″ x 16″ x 12″ and is designed for 3-5 nights of travel, according to Gura Gear. I didn’t test the 60L bag, but its size falls squarely between the 40L and 80L bags that I did test, so the estimated use seems fair to me. Of note is that the 25″ length still makes this bag long enough to carry a full-sized tripod like the popular RRS TVC-34L, which measures 23.9″ when collapsed, or the TVC-24L, which measures 23.3″. You’d have to remove the tripod head, and you may benefit from diagonal packing if you have a thickly padded tripod case. Still, it seems doable.

My duffel bag use tends to fall on one end of the spectrum or the other. I’m either going away for a 2-3 day personal or family trip over a weekend or packing for a 2-3 week trip for work. For these longer work trips, the smallest duffel bag I have ever flown with was a 75L duffel I took to Tasmania last year. That was a 2-week trip that had some checked-bag limitations due to stringent domestic baggage policies with Australian carriers.

That is to say that, personally, I don’t often need a 60L duffel, and even if I thought I did, I’d still opt for the 80L as my main bag to give me the flexibility to use it on a more extended trip. I would use the Mara 60L as a second bag alongside a Mara 80L when I needed more room for a lot of winter gear.

I can see a pair of Mara 60Ls or a combination of a 60L and a 40L being useful for anyone with strength or mobility issues. Remember, the bigger a bag gets, the heavier it is to lift. You may only have 80 litres of luggage to pack for your trip, but if you pack them all into an 80L bag, you may struggle to move it. Splitting the load across two bags will make it easier to lift the bags off luggage carousels onto a cart and from a cart into a vehicle. Choosing the 60L + 40L combo instead of two 40L bags gives you one bag that is a little longer, should you need to carry something like a tripod.

Mara 80L

Measuring 29″ x 17″ x 13″ and weighing just 2.9 lbs, the Mara 80L is the just-right duffel bag size for most people looking for a soft-sided checked luggage solution that remains backpackable if the need arises. Gura Gear says the bag is good for one week of travel. However, this is likely an underestimate for most people who aren’t on their first rodeo and aren’t traveling with much gear outside of clothing, additional footwear, and toiletries.

As long as I’m not traveling to a freezing location that requires bulky, specialized footwear and outerwear, I can make the Gura Gear Mara 80L work for two weeks of travel with clothing, a tripod, battery chargers, and even a lightweight sleeping bag that often comes with me “just in case.” I can pack some laundry detergent if I need to push that to three weeks or more without taking a second bag.

As I look at my calendar for the next few months, I see that is precisely what I’ll be doing for an upcoming photo expedition to outback Western Australia to look for some of its most endangered animals. I will again have to deal with the country’s draconian domestic baggage policies, so I’ll pack the Gura Gear family for that trip: Mara 80L, Kiboko 30L+, and Chobe 13.

Mara 100L

The 100L Mara Travel Duffel is the largest in the lineup. Most airlines allow checked luggage to have a maximum linear dimension (length + width + height) of 62 inches. The Mara 100L measures 32″ x 20″ x 15″, totaling 67 inches. That said, I’d have no qualms about flying with this bag. While I have had carry-on luggage measured many times, I have only ever had my checked luggage measured when it was pretty obviously oversized, such as when I checked sports equipment. I’d throw a generic luggage compression strap over the bag if I were particularly concerned.

Gura Gear didn’t expect the 100L bag to be all that popular, which surprised me. I often use a 100L Mountain Hardwear Expedition duffel and find this size necessary when traveling to colder destinations requiring winter boots and bulky down outerwear. Avid divers will also find this size a benefit. The $100 price jump from the 80L to the 100L size is significant, which may be one reason they didn’t expect it to sell as well—still, the weight benefits of the X-Pac VX21 material increase with the size of the bag.

The proportion of a bag’s weight made up of hardware such as zippers and buckles is much larger in smaller sizes. As bags increase in volume, the weight of hardware barely changes (assuming all sizes use the same hardware, which the Mara’s do), so the benefits of a lightweight face fabric increase. As a result, the Mara 100L duffel bag beats the competition’s weight-to-volume ratio by a much wider margin in the 100L size than in the smaller sizes. Nobody else makes an X-Pac duffel bag in this volume, so the Mara 100L duffel’s volume-to-weight ratio is a unique selling point in the world of travel luggage.

Carrying Camera Gear in the Mara Travel Duffels

I regularly pack camera gear into duffel bags for travel, only a few of which have been designed for this purpose. Of course, it’s always best to carry the expensive stuff like cameras and lenses in your carry-on. Still, additional, less mission-critical items often don’t fit into my usual Kiboko backpack. This includes battery chargers (I can charge with USB should these get lost), filters, a microphone, my Atomos Ninja recorder, and often an extra lens or two that may be nice but isn’t strictly necessary—usually a macro lens, and maybe an ultra-wide.

Gura Gear Chobe Inserts

Gura Gear doesn’t have a set of protective camera cubes explicitly designed for the Mara duffels, but they make four variations for the Chobe 13 and Chobe 16 shoulder bags that match the duffel’s interior colors. Some of these will work better than others, depending on the gear you want to carry and the duffel size you choose. I have the Wide inserts for the Chobe 13 and Chobe 16, but I only have two sizes of the Mara duffel. So, my recommendations can only go so far. Therefore, I’m including the insert’s dimensions below so you can figure out what might work for you.

• Chobe 13 Slim – 13.4 x 7.1 x 3.1″ / 34 x 18 x 7.9 cm
• Chobe 13 Wide – 13.4 x 7.1 x 5.1″ / 34 x 18 x 13 cm
• Chobe 16 Slim – 15 x 8.7 x 3.1″ / 38.1 x 22.1 x 7.9 cm
• Chobe 16 Wide – 15 x 8.7 x 5.1″ / 38.1 x 22.1 x 13 cm

From my testing, the Chobe 16 Wide insert perfectly fits the Mara 80L when stood up and pushed to one end of the bag. This insert provides enough space for a few small lenses and a camera or two, up to larger zooms like the Canon RF 100-500mm or 100-400mm lenses in the vertical position. If you need to carry something larger, you can fit a Sony 200-600mm, Canon RF 200-800mm, or Nikon Z 180-600mm lens horizontally in the Chobe 16 Wide insert.

Of course, looking at the photo of the Chobe 16 Wide insert in the Mara 80L, you can also see how you could continue to stack multiples of this insert across the base of the bag if you needed more padded protection. The Chobe 16 Slim insert is the same length and height as the Wide, so the setup would be similar, albeit without the width to carry chunky telephoto zooms. Realistically, this is all I need when packing a larger checked duffel like the 80L or 100L. I’m never going to pack cameras into it.

When testing my two wide Chobe inserts in the Mara 40L, I found neither fits across the bag, but both fit lengthways. The Chobe 13 Wide’s shorter height felt like a better fit with the depth of the Mara 40L, but you can still zipper the bag shut with the Chobe 16 Wide insert standing vertically. The downside to the Chobe inserts is their lack of a lid. It’s not much of an issue if the rest of the bag is well-packed and thus holds the insert in place, but it’s not ideal if the insert is floating around. For that reason, I continued to rummage in my gear cupboard to explore other options.

Think Tank Stash Master

Think Tank Photo’s Stash Master series of padded camera cubes should be most people’s first choice if the Gura Gear Chobe inserts don’t suit their needs and they want to protect camera gear in a fully enclosed insert in a Mara duffel. These work well for most camera accessories and lenses up to a 70-200mm f/2.8. All five sizes of the Stash Master cubes easily fit into all four Mara duffle sizes. I haven’t bothered to post all their dimensions in this review because they are listed in my Stash Master review, along with a pile of additional photos.

F-Stop ICUs and Shimoda Core Units

If you’d like to carry more or even larger lenses in your Mara duffel than fit in the Gura Gear Chobe or Think Tank Stash Master inserts, check out F-Stop’s range of ICUs or Shimoda’s range of Core Units. All sizes of all F-Stop ICUs and Shimoda Core Units fit into the Mara 60L, 80L, and 100L. Go nuts. Choose whichever one you want.

The largest F-Stop ICU that fits into the Mara 40L is the Large Pro ICU, and the largest Shimoda Core Unit that fits into the Mara 40L is the Large DSLR Core Unit v3, both pictured above. I’d lean towards using the F-Stop ICU over the Shimoda Core Unit because the ICU’s padded lid is preferable to the Core Unit’s thin nylon cover. Of course, at this point, you should ask yourself why you aren’t just buying a dedicated camera backpack, but who am I to judge? I’ll assume you’ve had that conversation with yourself!

Mara 40L Vs. Kiboko 30L for Carry-On

When I first saw the Mara series, I wondered if there was a situation where using the Mara 40L as a carry-on was preferable to my usual Kiboko 30L+ backpack. The Kiboko 30L+ comfortably fits international carry-on standards for most airlines, but the Mara 40L isn’t much bigger and, importantly, still looks small and compressible when carried. In fact, despite those dimensions and its larger internal volume, you can see it almost looks smaller than the Kiboko in the comparative photos, so long as you don’t stuff the duffel to bursting.

To test this idea further, mostly so that you don’t have to, I loaded my Kiboko 30L+ with the kit I have often carried in the past 12 months: Sony 600mm f/4 GM, Sony 300mm f/2.8 GM, Sony 70-200mm f/4 G II, 1.4x teleconverter, 2x teleconverter, Sony a9 III, Sony a1, plus various critical accessories like memory card wallet, spare batteries, and some camera and lens cleaning gear. Next, I transferred this gear from a packed-full Kiboko 30L+ into the Mara 40L. I wrapped lenses in neoprene LensCoat Travel Coats and cameras in LensCoat BodyBags for the transfer. Small accessories were packed into the many organizational pockets of the Mara Travel Duffel.

The volume difference between the Mara and the Kiboko is 10L on paper. However, the difference seems much more significant in practice because using neoprene protectors allows you to fit the jigsaw together much tighter in the Mara 40L than in a camera bag with padded dividers. There was so much room left over that I could easily add a Sony 200-600mm lens to the kit and get it all zipped up. Still, it was a higgledy-piggledy mess that would be nearly impossible to work from and offered mediocre protection for $40K of camera gear.

Would I use this setup in practice? Not with a full bag, no. It only makes sense to opt for the Mara 40L instead of the Kiboko 30L as a carry-on bag if you bring minimal camera gear and need the rest of the space for non-photographic gear. Despite offering a theoretical way to carry more camera gear in a roughly similarly-sized bag, it won’t be a practical alternative to the Kiboko 30L+.

Alternative Travel Duffel Bags

When it comes to travel packing, I’m a duffel guy, which means I have many other bags to compare with the Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffel. When the Maras first showed up for testing, I went to my gear closet and pulled out a variety of alternatives from a collection that includes most of the well-known options on the market: Patagonia Black Hole Duffel, Osprey Transporter Duffel, The North Face Base Camp Duffel, and Mountain Hardwear Expedition Duffel. My collection contains even more models that are no longer on the market from brands like Arcteryx, MEC, and REI. In short, I have a lot of experience with this bag style, and it gave me a lot to think about while I tested the Mara.

Weight Discussion

When I handled the Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffels for the first time, their low weight stood out to me immediately. I didn’t need to put them on my scales or even consult the spec sheets to know right away that these were the lightest duffel bags I had ever used in their class. What makes this even more impressive is that the Maras achieve this while offering more organization–eight pockets in total–than any other duffel in my collection. Usually, more pockets equals more zippers and material, which equals higher weight.

Comparing all duffel bag weights is tricky because different models are available in various sizes. Still, the data table clearly shows that the Mara Travel Duffels offer the lowest weight-to-capacity ratio of all these expedition-style travel duffel bags. I’m sure lighter, thin-skinned nylon duffels exist, of the packable kind that rolls up into themselves. However, that’s not a fair comparison. I’m specifically concerned with how the Maras compare to heavy-duty expedition-style travel duffels. The kinds you’d be happy to check in at the airport for the baggage handlers to do their worst, strap to the back of a mule on a Nepalese trek, or throw in and out of a truck as you tour the dusty roads of South America.

Features and Build

As mentioned above, the Gura Gear Mara duffels offer eight organizational pockets—one on the front, one on the top, and six internally. No other duffel I have tested has this many pockets. A standard layout for most would be a lid pocket and one or two internal mesh pockets at either end. From an organizational standpoint, the Gura Gear Mara duffel bags outclass anything else in the field. More pockets mean fewer stuff sacks and other floating organizational accessories, saving you more weight.

The overall construction of the Maras is also noteworthy. X-Pac’s ultralight VX21 sailcloth-style nylon makes up most of the duffel’s outer fabric, with thicker X-Pac VX42 on the base for added durability. Only one other duffel bag I have tested, the Mountain Hardwear Expedition, employs X-Pac’s famed-for-durability fabrics, using X51 for the base of its Expedition Duffel series.

Moreover, Gura Gear has lined the bag with its signature light grey nylon to improve gear visibility internally. Many expedition-style duffles, such as the North Face Base Camp and Osprey Transporter, are not lined, leaving the interior color the same as the exterior color–often dark and far from ideal. The Mara Travel Duffels offer more features and an additional lining material throughout the bag while still tipping the scales with lower numbers than the competition.

Price Discussion

The Mara Travel Duffels are lighter and more fully featured than most other durable travel duffels, but this comes at a cost. In this case, we don’t need to compare every size with all the options on the market, but I’ll select a few examples. The Mara 40L is currently $299, the Patagonia Black Hole 40L is $159, and the Osprey Transporter 40L is $160. The Mara 80L is $399, the Osprey Transporter 95 is $200, and the Mountain Hardwear Expedition 100L is $280. (Remember that you can save 10% on Mara duffels using my discount code at the bottom of the page.)

These examples make it fair to say that the Gura Gear Mara duffel bags are significantly more expensive than other travel duffel bags from mainstream brands. However, none of those brands make their bags entirely from expensive, ultralight X-Pac materials. Gura Gear’s Mara price points align with expectations if you dig deeper into the catalogs of smaller niche bag brands offering X-Pac bags, like Aer, Boundary Supply, and, a favorite of mine, Evergoods.

Here’s the thing, though: none of those brands offer X-Pac duffel bags in sizes beyond a typical 35/40L carry-on size. I am not aware of anyone else producing large X-Pac duffel bags in sizes that can be realistically used for extended travel with a lot of gear–60L, 80L, and 100L. So, while the Gura Gear Mara bags have price points that may raise an eyebrow, they offer a unique combination of volume-to-weight ratio and durability thanks to the all-around X-Pac construction.

Conclusion

If you’re thinking, “I didn’t know anyone could write 7000 words about duffle bags,” you must be new here. I don’t mess around when advising you on whether to spend hundreds of dollars on premium gear. And make no mistake; the Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffels are premium travel bags with price tags to match. The question is, has Gura Gear managed to design a set of travel bags that live up to the quality and thoughtfulness of design that is appreciated so much in its camera bags?

The answer is an easy “Yes.” But whether or not you should buy one is a little more complicated. Gura Gear has taken its usual approach to bag design and cuts no corners with hardware and material choices. The Mara Travel Duffels feature the finest zippers, buckles, mesh materials, and face fabrics you could reasonably imagine using on a bag for rugged world travel. The combination of light-but-strong X-Pac VX21 and VX42 gives these bags incredible volume-to-weight ratios that beat everything on the market when you compare the larger sizes.

There’s no doubt, then, that if you want to carry a large amount of gear in the lightest possible way while still protecting it from the rigors of air travel, or even yak travel for that matter, the Gura Gear Mara Travel Duffel raises the bar. If your trip requires you to use soft-sided luggage so that you can jam the bags between the seats of a bush plane, or you want to use every last ounce of your checked bag weight restriction on gear and clothing instead of needlessly wasting it on the bag’s weight, the Mara is the answer, if–and this is a big if for some people–you don’t mind paying the price.

While there is no getting away from the high price of the Mara duffels, let’s not forget that Gura Gear’s most popular camera bag is the Kiboko 30L+, also made from X-Pac VX21 and priced accordingly at $459, beyond all but the Mara 100L. I often encounter entire groups of wildlife photographers all carrying the Kiboko, which tells me that plenty of people find value in and appreciate the quality of Gura Gear’s bags, even when cheaper alternatives exist. Those photographers know that the Kiboko is the best carry-on bag for air travel with their camera gear, and soon enough, they’ll figure out that the Mara Travel Duffel is the best bag for everything else.