Useful Travel Equipment

We’ve come across a few interesting pieces of equipment in our preparations, here are a few details:

1) Eagle Creek Compression Sacs

These are heavy duty strengthened ziploc bags with ultralight one-way valves in. Put your clothes in, seal it up and then squeeze the air out. Amazingly simple, and amazingly effective for puffy packing items like clothes, sleeping bags etc. At a shade less than 100 grams for 44 x 72cm 800 cu.in. of space these really are a must have if you need more space with minimal weight gain for packing all that extra unnecessary junk you really need!

http://www.eaglecreek.com/accessories/compression_bags/Pack-It-Compression-Sac-Large-40148/

2) PHD Mountain Software

What software do you need up a mountain you may ask? The ‘software’ in question here is actually goose down, the state-of-the-art in goose down no less! Peter Hutchinson has been designing expedition equipment for 48 years focussing on extreme mountaineering equipment. His latest wonder is the Minim Ulta Down sleeping bag made from the new ultrafine ripstop MX material with extremely high quality down, it weighs in at 345 grams. With a typical operating temperature of  8°C it’s perfect for ultralight travel up to medium altitudes in warmer climates.

Go and get a PHD! http://www.phdesigns.co.uk/index.php?cPath=25

3) Solio Hybrid Charger

The Solio hybrid charger from Better Energy Systems is a combined solar charger and 1800 MAh Lithium ion battery. It can charge digital cameras, satellite phones, iPods, mobiles, blackberries as well as store solar energy or just function as a standard charger. It’s cunning design protects the solar panels while travelling but then the panels flip open like flower petals to increase surface area for charging. Encased in a tough magnesium alloy shell but still less than 180 grams it’s pretty useful kit with a compact universal plug adaptor.

4) Be Well Expedition Foods

I’ve used Be Well’s products on a few trips now and they’ve always performed well. There’s lots of expedition food on the market, but expedition food that is palatable, has a varied menu and is nutritionally and salt balanced is something much harder to find, particularly amongst freeze dried foods. Be-Well excel at well designed foods (both in the nutritional and packaging sense) – 2400 quite palatable calories weighing only 710 grams. As well as being used by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Be Well’s technical sports nutrition products are used by world class athletes like Denise Lewis and Martin Johnson. They clearly stay sharp at the Be-Well office, sometimes I order in the evening and it arrives the next morning, how do they do that??

http://www.be-well.co.uk/about.html

5) Wilderness Medical Training

Wilderness Medical Training provided our medical training for this trip, and they also work with the BBC and others like Bruce Parry of Tribe. I’ve been on a few courses and WMT’s is the most extensive course with a medical focus as well as I think the only recognised course to provide training on basic medical tasks such as intramuscular injection, setting up drips and intravenous medication, how to stitch up wounds as well as providing introductory triage case studies. We spent a happy Monday afternoon sewing up ‘wounds’ in a piece of belly pork to practice our suturing technique! Not for those with a weak stomach but then not many medical courses are!

http://www.wildernessmedicaltraining.co.uk/

We’ll be testing out this gear (but in the case of medical training hopefully not testing it!) over the next year along with some other things like Canon’s new camera the EOS 5D MkII (for which much has already been written especially on it’s amazing video capabilities – e.g. see Vincent LaForet’s blog), and we’ll let you know how it gets on…