Is November the optimum time to be publishing a post on camping kit? Nope! But I had other things I wanted to talk about first and this will be in place and waiting for you to take an interest again next summer. I wanted to show you and talk a little bit about the kit I take with me to camp in Iceland. I like the flexibility it gives me – to be able to decide “I’ve had enough driving today, I’m going to stop at the next campsite” or “I didn’t know this place existed when I set out this morning, I’m going to stay here tonight”. It means I don’t have to worry about being at a set place every evening. I could get the same flexibility with a campervan, I know. People talk a lot about vans. If you see a video of a Ring Road trip, they’ll almost certainly be in a van. But for one person, campervans are more expensive than hiring a small car and taking a tent. The van is probably warmer and more comfortable and more convenient but I did the sums. Car + tent is cheaper than campervan. I am your camping-in-Iceland advocate!
Tent: Blacks Octane 1
I did do a post about my tent only a year ago but let’s repeat the relevant bits for the sake of keeping all my Iceland stuff together. My tent is a one-man tent, now discontinued. The OEX Bobcat 1 looks pretty similar except it has two guylines holding the front open whereas I have just one, which I rarely bother putting in because it gets in the way when I’m getting in and out of the tent.
If you google my tent, you’ll probably find it in red. At time of buying, I had the choice of dark green or yellow and because I had some idea that camping in the Highlands meant some kind of wild camping, I opted for highly-visible yellow. Of course, wild camping in Iceland is both illegal and unnecessary – it causes damage to Iceland’s fragile ecosystem, which can take decades to repair because of its growing-unfriendly weather, and there are campsites in every settlement, almost invariably with plentiful geothermal hot water. The yellow means it’s permanently light in my tent and I wake up every morning convinced it’s a beautiful sunny day. That rarely turns out to be correct but once in a while I get surprised.
The tent has a surprisingly large porch for its size. I deduce that in 2013, I must have left my 100l duffle bag out there, because it wasn’t fitting inside the bedroom and as I was travelling around by bus, I didn’t have the luxury of a car to leave it in. Not that the porch is enormous but when I’ve got the door open and I’m sitting inside, I can leave my boots, my books, whatever I’m eating and a couple of drybags of stuff out in it quite comfortably. I prefer not to leave the bags out there overnight – for some reason, that porch just feels a lot less secure than the porch does in my bigger tents.
The sleeping compartment is pretty small. I can sit up but my head brushes against the ceiling. The sleeping bag will often be wet in the morning because it’s touched one of the sides, which seem to be prone to condensation. I tried sleeping with the inner door mostly open this summer in an attempt to knock off the condensation and it didn’t work. I also don’t think I’d want to be a lot taller than I am (somewhere around 5’5″) because my feet are pretty much touching the other end. There are net pockets at both ends for things like glasses and torches and although the door has a mesh panel, it doesn’t have anything to cover that panel. I suppose that makes it more breathable but there have been times when I’d like to not have so much cold air coming in.
It packs down into a small enough bag to put in a duffle bag in the plane’s hold, which is my main reason for buying it. I use about ten pegs to put it up, which takes around five minutes, depending on whether or not I took the inner out the last time I put it up. In Iceland, I tend not to bother because I know I’ll be putting it up somewhere new every evening, so I might as well save myself some effort. If I’m being particularly lazy and the weather is fine, it’s quite happy to stand up without the guylines. Now, I did remove the original guys. I’d heard that it’s very windy in Iceland, so I bought some new ones and I have two excessively-long ropes on each attachment point instead of one of reasonable length. Other than perhaps that first night, I don’t think I’ve ever bothered putting both out. It makes my tent look like some kind of demented spider.
It holds up just fine in Icelandic weather. I admit, I’ve not had the disastrously windy weather I was promised, in ten years of camping (on and off; I didn’t between 2017 and 2021) but it’s shrugged off rain and breeze. I watched a video of someone who’d paid £550 for a tent that was about to get shredded by a bit of British wind after only a couple of weeks. This one… well, ten years later, I can’t remember how much I paid, but somewhere between £120 and £150. If I’d known how long I’d keep using it, I might have considered investing in something by Terra Nova or Wild Country but it’s done fine so far. My only criticism is that because of the angle of the front door, you do tend to drip into the sleeping compartment if you open the outer when it’s wet. It doesn’t pour in but it would be nice if it didn’t drip. However, that’s a relatively small complaint for a tent I’ve been happy with for a long time.
Sleeping bag: Mountain Hardware Lamina Z Flame
I bought my four-season sleeping bag in 2018 for the Laugavegur Trail (so also discontinued five years on), rightly figuring that my cheap three-season bag wasn’t going to be up to the job of camping in the Highlands in early summer – late winter to the rest of the world. It’s a kind of mint-green on the outside and bright yellow inside, with a pocket on the outside for my phone. I have a Go Outdoors sleeping pod which is an extra-wide bag meant for starfishing and I put my four-season inside that in real winter. I also use it outside sometimes if it’s definitely going to be warm, as it’s only two seasons. I don’t take it to Iceland. The reason I mention it is that it also has a phone pocket but it’s inside, with no padding between me and it, which means I get smacked in the face with a piece of glass and metal all night. The Lamina Z Flame has plenty of padding, so it doesn’t hurt but it also insulates it, which helps the battery to last.
Although I bought it specifically for cold weather, it’s become the bag I take to Iceland regardless. If it’s warm, I unzip it and use it as a quilt. That’s how it mostly got used this summer. It makes it more flexible than it might otherwise be. Not that it’s a great four-season bag. I think there’s a reason they go up to several hundred pounds and mine was only about £150. Even in the UK, I wouldn’t use it on its own in winter. For all I claim to be a polar bear, the cold does bother me, especially at night but I don’t camp much in winter, only at Sparkle & Ice and I’ve mastered that one after six years. The bag says -6C which I think is its lower limit, comfort limit being 0C although that apparently depends which website you look at because some have -12C / -6C respectively. It’s not what you’d taken for a Himalayan expedition, is my point. But I’ve found it’s more than adequate for Icelandic adventures in the summer.
My main quibble is that it’s a right-handed bag. My first real sleeping bag was left-handed and so that’s what I’m used to. I’m right-handed and every sleeping bag I’ve had since I left uni was right-handed but it still feels weird. It’s not what I prefer. I’d like it to be wider but I do recognise and understand that the more space there is inside, the more air there is for my body heat to keep warm and therefore the colder I’ll be.
Mat: Mountain Equipment Helium 3.8 Warmzone
I’m actually on my second of these. The first, which I bought in 2013, has become my staple mat for camping in Iceland and at home so it’s got more use than my other kit – I use my two- or four-man if I’m not taking a tent on a plane and if I camp in summer at home, I tend not to require a four-season sleeping bag. But why sleep on a piece of foam when you’ve got a perfectly good self-inflating mat? The upshot is that by the summer of 2022, it had acquired a leak. I found one hole and patched it but I never found the second. I spent six nights in Iceland where the mat was inflated when I went to bed and utterly flat by the morning, which meant it was uncomfortable but also cold. But it was a good mat and it rolled up into a small enough bundle to take on a plane and so I replaced it. Yes, the only piece of Iceland camping kit that’s still available to buy!
That was the problem, the amount of space. I had two foam mats from my DofE days but while they’re lovely and light, they’re too bulky to put in a bag that can go on a plane. I sought advice from a man who was too excited about sleeping outside and I left with this mat. Honestly, I don’t deflate it in Iceland. I open the valve and push it either into the back seat or the boot, depending on where my wet tent is and then I just top it up when I arrive at the next campsite. Self-inflating mats only inflate themselves to a certain degree and it needs a few puffs from me to firm it up. The last couple of breaths trigger my gag reflex so the less I have to blow up every day, the better.
What can I say? I recommend it. I bought a second one when the old one gave up the ghost. I like the size of it. I like the comfort of it. I bought a camping bed this summer which obviously I did not take to Iceland and while I was adventuring, it never even crossed my mind that I had a proper bed at home. Today is actually August 31st as I write and I’m going to Camp Wildfire tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about it for a month and gathering my stuff for two weeks and it’s only occurred to me today that I have that camp bed and could take it with me. The self-inflating mat does the job just fine.
And that’s all the kit I use. I don’t take a pillow, I either use some clothes on their own or I stuff them into a drybag (make sure you squeeze the air out otherwise it inflates too much to be able to put your head on). I don’t take a stove; I just live off supermarket food, sandwiches, crisps etc. I don’t take a camp chair – it’s 50/50 whether I’ll take one when I’m packing into my entire car, let alone when I’ve got to get it on a plane. What else might people take? Pots & pans – same answer as for stove. I have a tarp but it’s such a pain to put up single-handed that I only really take that on special trips where it’s going to stay up for several days. I don’t take a gazebo. I don’t know if there’s anything else you might expect me to take but no, that’s it. Tent, mat, sleeping bag. Oh, I take my body weight in drybags and I take a headtorch (ancient Petzl Tikka) but you don’t really need it in Iceland in summer; it so rarely gets dark enough, especially if your tent is yellow.