Camping is, for us, one of the best parts of bike touring.
It might seem daunting at first – all that extra weight! what happens when it rains? – but once you’ve experienced the freedom that carrying a tent brings, the ability to spend time in beautiful and remote areas, and the happy glow that comes from flopping exhausted into your own little home each night, it’s hard to imagine touring without a tent.
Thermarest Mats: Comparing the Prolite and the Z-Lite
A good bike tour means getting a good night’s sleep so if you’re going to be camping, it’s important to choose a good mat. We’re big fans of Thermarest mats. They’re comfortable, the company backs its product with a lifetime guarantee and, having tested that guarantee on the road, we can vouch for the great […] Read More »
6 Tips For Picking A Sleeping Bag
Crawling into a cozy sleeping bag after a long day on the bike, knowing that you’re settling down for a well-earned rest, is one of the wonderful pleasures of touring. Equally memorable, for all the wrong reasons, is a sleepless, freezing night because your sleeping bag just wasn’t up to the job. Here are 6 […] Read More »
Tips for Wild Camping
Learning how to wild camp (also commonly known as free camping or stealth camping) is one of the most important skills an independent bike tourist can master. There are many reasons why it’s good to be comfortable with wild camping. Bicycle travel is unpredictable. You never know how weather, terrain, energy levels, flat tires and other […] Read More »
Water Treatment For Remote Bike Tours
For bike tours that take you away from the hustle and bustle of civilisation (as all the best ones seem to do), it’s crucial to consider how you will find clean drinking water. Here’s a guide to the different options, from simple boiling to complex purifiers. Read More »
Why I Love Trangia Campstoves
Steve Tober has been travelling with his bike for over 20 years and in all that time, he’s only used one stove: the Swedish made Trangia. “All these years later, the same Trangia is still going strong,” Steve says as he tells us just what’s so great about his favourite stove. Read More »
Keep Your Tent Zippers Working
It’s the nightmare of every camper: you’re climbing in for the night in a cloud of mosquitoes and just as you’re frantically trying to close up the tent the zippers on the door fail. Visions flash before your eyes of a whole night plagued by blood-sucking insects. Before you dive into your sleeping bag for […] Read More »
Going Soft: Adding A Pillow To Our Bike Touring Gear
We’ve taken another step towards the ‘pampered’ end of bike touring. After 3 years of sleeping on a “pillow” of scrunched up clothes, we’ve finally splurged on the real thing: a Thermarest Compressible Pillow. Read More »
Choosing A Tent for Bicycle Touring
A tent is perhaps the most crucial piece of equipment that the independent bicycle tourist will carry. It will be your home away from home, a haven from wind, rain and cold temperatures, a key to travelling on a budget and one of the few constants that appears every night as you go from place […] Read More »
MSR Whisperlite Internationale Review
Every long bicycle trip needs a good campstove and for our journey we bought the MSR Whisperlite International. It was an excellent choice – proving itself to be very efficient and reliable. We still use it, and wouldn’t hesitate to take ours on another journey around the globe. Read More »
Ortlieb folding bowl
It’s hard to separate the important accessories from the frivolous ones when choosing what to take on a tour. For a long time we put Ortlieb’s 10 litre folding bowl () in the second category. We couldn’t imagine why we needed one. It wasn’t until we met a couple with not one but two folding […] Read More »
Camelbak Unbottle 70
Water bottles mounted to your bike frame are fine for shorter journeys but you need to carry far more water than your bottles will hold when wild camping or crossing isolated landscapes. That’s where the Camelbak Unbottle 70 () comes in handy. It holds 2 litres of water and weighs about 340 grams. We actually didn’t […] Read More »