Camping Equipment

There are a few key things in our camping equipment that are worth noting.

Tent

A few years ago, our eldest son bought us a tent as a Christmas present. This was a good tent for touring. It was made by the small UK company based in Leeds, Lightwave. The specific model was the t2 trek xt. We actually had the earlier model and several improvements have been made since. The current version weighs only 2.89 Kilograms (6.35lbs) complete. It is a tunnel design, two man tent with a spacious awning for such a light package and head room in the awning of 1200mm (47 inches). We used the tent on our Outer Hebrides trip and it stood up to a force 8 gale. It is a great tent for short tours.

For our round the World trip though we decided that, as we would be spending so much time in our tent, we wanted something a little bigger, even if it meant carrying more weight. Specifically we wanted a tent that was still robust, but high enough to allow us to actually sit on stool inside the tent. We researched the market and were tempted by the Hilleberg range and the Wechsel range. Both offered tunnel tents with higher profiles, but they attached an equally high profile price.

We came back to a good old UK standby - "Vango" and surprisingly found a tent in their equipment range that fitted the bill very well.

The Equinox 350 is a roomy three man tent with a very generous head clearance of 1350mm (53 inches) and weighing only 5.3kg (11.66lbs). OK it's nearly double the weight of our last tent, but hey we are getting old and need a bit of comfort at least - even if it does mean harder pedaling.

What has been our experience of it so far? Broadly speaking very good. Despite its height, the internal stays give it goodd rigidity and it is still quite stable in high winds. There a few issues with it. Firstly due to its larger footprint, it is more difficult to find a good flat pitch and this does not suit it to wild camping very well. It is not very tolerant of being pitched on anything other than flat ground. There is also quite a large gap under the edge of the flysheet, which can make it very draughty.

When it is cold at night it also suffers a lot from condensation on the inside of the flysheet, which drips onto the inner tent. When you also have a dew on the outside, this means that you tend to have to pack wet and when the days are short, you re-pitch it and it never dries out again. We therefore feel it is really only a tent for summer camping in good dry conditions.

The door zips on the fly tend to jam due to the fabric getting caught in the zip, which is an annoying inconvenience. Another annoyance is that when there is water on the outside of the tent and you undo the flysheet zip water drips onto the groundsheet in the awning.

Groundsheet

The groundsheet that Vango sell for the Equinox 350 is very heavy. Almost as much as the tent again, so we looked for an alternative. There appeared to be two materials in the blogs that people were talking about. One was Silicon Impregnated Nylon (SilNylon) and the other was a plastic material. SilNylon is nice and flexible, easy to work with and doesn’t make any noise when you move around on it. However it is not 100% waterproof. The other material however is 100% waterproof, very light but also very noisy when you move around on it.

We decided that we could probably put up with the sheet not being quite waterproof. We bought a couple of lengths of the material and made our own groundsheet. However several weeks of camping in wet UK conditions showed us that it really was not waterproof enough. Several times woke up to puddles on the sheet. Before we left the UK we looked for an alternative. We found a material in a local army surplus store in Plymouth. It weighs about the same as the SilNylon, but has proved to be 100% waterproof. It is a little more noisy and quite slippery as it has a waxy feel to it. So we bought three lengths and over the winter we will make it up into a groundsheet to fit the tent. We are not sure what the material actually is.

Stove

As we would be travelling through some remote spots, where getting gas cylinders may prove difficult, we decided to go for a multi-fuel stove.

Again, having researched the market we chose the Primus Omnifuel. It is light and compared to some of the high speed, high altitude burners is relatively controllable. We do like to cook reasonable food rather than just eating pot-noodles or soup, so some control is necessary.

As standard equipment it comes with two different jets enabling use of Gas, White Fuel and Petrol. We have been pleased with the use of fuel and the speed of cooking, it's as good as the old Primus stoves that I used as a lad when I used to go camping. Getting petrol proved to be problematical only in the UK. The major service station chains and supermarkets only allow a minimum delivery of 2 litres and even then some won’t allow you to fill anything other than their approved containers, the Primus bottle not being one. Unfortunately, the UK is full of “jobs worths” like this, everywhere else it isn’t a problem at all.

Pan Set

We have not been impressed by any of the pan sets we have seen. They are generally made for backpackers who just want to boil water or cook pot noodles, or so it seems. Believe it or not, you manufacturers out there, bicycle tourists actually do want to eat reasonable food and therefore need a decent set of pans. In the end we opted for the MSR Blacklite set, which has a frying pan, one small and one large saucepan. They are aluminium, about 2mm thick and Teflon coated. As with most non-stick pans, the coating is wearing off, particularly around the rims, where the clamp handle fits. I mean, which bright engineer at MSR designs a pan with Teflon coating up to the rim and then designs a clamp handle to scratch it off again? Duh!

Come the new year we will probably look for another set I suppose.

Sleeping Bags & Mats

Its really important to be able to sleep well, particularly as you get older. With down sleeping bags you run the risk that if they get wet they are useless and take forever to dry out again, but they are the lightest and warmest type. We bought three season, down bags from Cumulus and self inflating Artiach mats . We have had one puncture, which we managed to seal with Seamgrip. We have been really pleased with this combination. We also bought some Lifeventure sleeping bag liners and some silk pyjamas that we can use if it gets really cold and for staying in shared dormitories. If it gets really hot we can just use the liners on their own without the sleeping bags.

Other things

As we planned to spend a lot of time in our tent, we bought two lightweight, three legged stools and a small aluminium folding table. It does help to have a level surface on which to place things.

We also bought an Ortielb folding wash bowl and collapsible water carrier.

We use a small LED lantern powered by four AAA batteries for light.

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