A couple of years ago now, I bought myself a new tent. I’m very fond of my two-man tunnel tent with porch but I kind of fancied something a bit bigger and I found a 4-man on sale for £80. That’s a really good price! Sometimes you’d struggle to find a decent 2-man for that price. There must be a catch! At the time, I assumed the catch was simply that it was last year’s tent and they were selling off the last of the stock but it’s still available on Go Outdoors right now, and it’s trending – “1oo+ sold in 48 hours”.
Last summer, I rescued a tent. It got left at a festival. I think. I hope. Two ladies came as solos, met on the official WhatsApp group, came separately but pitched next to each, next to me. On Sunday night, I came home in the dark to find them gone. “Well, they probably had to be back in work on Monday morning,” thought I. But when I got up, I discovered that only one of them had actually gone. The other tent was still there but flattened. It had been emptied of personal stuff, the pegs had been taken out, the poles removed from their moorings but left in the sleeves and there was no sign of the owner. If she’d met someone and spent the night with them, she wouldn’t have removed all her stuff and flattened the tent. If she was coming back, she wouldn’t have taken the tent bag and pegs. What on earth had happened? If you can’t be bothered to pack up your tent and take it with you, you don’t go to the effort of flattening it. You just walk away. The only thing I can conclude is that she was forced to abandon it on pain of missing a taxi for a train. If any of this sounds familiar, drop me an email and let me know that I’ve stolen your tent. It’s doing just fine.
On the other hand, I may have figured out why an apparently brand new tent got abandoned at a festival that prides itself on not attracting the sort of people who abandon tents. The tent is a Eurohike Cairns 5 DLX, so brand new that its guy ropes are still neon yellow, untouched by the merest speck of mud. I loved it. That’s why I hung around, watching and waiting and contemplating before just going for it and rescuing it.
Eurohike Sendero 4
The Sendero 4 is the tent I take when I want a bit of luxury. It’s got a huge sleeping compartment – well, it fits four and I’m only one! – but it’s also got a huge porch. The porch is as big as the bedroom and the whole thing is big enough to stand up in. I take it with me when I’ve got the time for it to be worth taking half an hour to put it up, when I want to take some furniture with me, have some space to move, space to sit in it. I admit, I can be a very bougie camper. I have a folding cupboard and a folding kitchen unit and the only reason my kitchen bag is still a bag is because I haven’t figured out a better way to transport it. I sometimes take a tarp and put it up over the front to give me more shade (or more rain shelter) and it’s like camping in a palace. The old two-man still has its place – when I’m literally just after a roof over my head, when it’s not worth the effort of pitching and then drying a huge tent etc, or when I want to conserve heat – it’s the one I take to Sparkle & Ice, Girlguiding’s winter survival camp (little spoiler: due to the TACs being sold off, it’s not being held this year so I’m going glamping and going to do it myself like I did in 2021).
I said this last week: I don’t camp for the purposes of travelling and exploring. I camp for the purposes of having a weekend outside, away from my real life. I may go for a walk or a paddle but chances are, I’m going to spend anything upwards of 85% of my weekend in or around the tent. That’s why I like to have one big enough to stand up in and big enough to make my home in.
And the Sendero 4 is great! Walking around campsites, I see it comes in a 6-man variant as well but honestly, a 4-man for one person is palatial. I don’t think there’s any benefit for me on my own to upgrading to a tent 50% bigger. I love the size of the porch, I can make a proper home out of that, with my cupboard and my kitchen and my chair and my food box and my bucket of miscellaneous tent supplies. There’s a plastic window on one side and a mesh window on the other, so I can have fresh air coming in when it’s dry and I can still see out when it’s raining and I have to close the mesh window. Honestly, I would absolutely buy the Sendero 4 again.
I do have some criticisms, though. The first is that there is no way on God’s green earth that it will ever fit back into the bag it came in. I can just about get the outer into that bag but the inner, no way. It’s far too bulky and it traps air and when you try to fold it up, it just turns into a miniature bouncy castle. I can just about get the whole lot into a blue Ikea bag. Not that the outer is entirely without problems. It has a built-in groundsheet right up to the door, something I’ve not seen before. Usually the porch groundsheet is attached to the inner and you just fold it inside when you fold it up. But in this case, the outer is a complete 360° thing, which means it also tends to get full of air when you try to fold it up.
Second, that built-in groundsheet means it’s very hard to dry out the porch. If it’s raining, water will inevitably get in when you open the front door and there’s no way of draining it away. The fact that it’s built-in does mean less water gets in from underneath but it’s annoying that you can’t get rid of it. Which brings me to problem number three, the front door.
The entire front of the tent is a door. It has zips down both sides from roof to floor and you can roll it up to create a big semi-open porch. Lovely. This design works fine in a small tent but in a big tent, when you zip it up, you discover that you have a five-foot strip of the front of the tent where nothing is holding it down. On a three-foot wide door, that’s no problem but the extra width means extra flapping and a far wider gap. In other words, when it rains, the water runs down the closed front door but rather than lying over the “doorstep” and dripping onto the ground outside, it runs straight down and drips into the tent, into the built-in groundsheet. I’ve done a little DIY here. For one thing, I’ve sewn on some loops (keyrings actually) along the front edge of the tent so it’s held down in more places than just the front corners. I’ve also glued some heavy-duty velcro along the bottom of the doorstep and the inside of the door in an attempt to hold them together. It’s not an ideal solution.
And my fourth criticism is simply that this is a tunnel tent – it doesn’t stand up by itself until you’ve pegged it out. Surface tension means the three sections tend to cling to each other and it’s an absolute pig to put up by yourself in a wind. I first did it on a windy day on the edge of Dartmoor and I had to rush off to an agricultural shop to buy 20m of blue baler twine to use as emergency guy ropes, hoping against hope that the tent wouldn’t snap while I was away. But it’s pretty sturdy once it’s up, especially with storm guys crossed over each side.
Eurohike Cairns 5 DLX
I was really excited about trying this out – and also a little nervous. Suppose there was a reason it got abandoned, a reason I hadn’t noticed while drying it and packing it away! I was also excited about trying out a big 5-man tent on my own.
Problem 1, as I’ve said, was that its previous owner had taken the bag and the pegs. The pegs are easy, just pop into an outdoors shop and buy a couple of packets of pegs. The bag was harder. Replacement tent bags are available but what size do you need? After dithering for six months, I opted for a Hi-Gear Easy Pack Tent Carrybag and frankly, that’s getting its own review later on.
I arrived in the New Forest the other day on a similarly breezy day to the first time I put up the Sendero. I found myself a quiet corner, I set up my GoPro and I began to put the tent up. I’m firmly of the belief that dome tents are easier than tunnels and this is a dome. Once you’ve put the two main poles in, the tent will stand up by itself and you can walk it around until it’s in the right place and facing the right direction. Unfortunately, it turns into a huge high-capacity sail and I spent more time dragging it out of a thorn bush (please don’t tear it, please don’t tear it!) than I did revelling in how easy it was to handle. A 5-man is a considerable sized tent for one person and so walking it across the pitch until it was where I wanted it, especially in a breeze, was a harder job than I anticipated. But I got it pegged down, I got the porch pole in (this is best done when the tent is flat, not when the main poles are already pegged down!) and I moved in.
First discovery: this tent does not have a substantial porch. There’s no way of fitting a cupboard, a kitchen unit and a folding chair all in while still keeping the bedroom accessible. In fact, between the angle of the porch walls and the wind, the kitchen unit couldn’t stand up and had to be disassembled and put away. The cupboard had to live in the bedroom, which isn’t terribly convenient when I normally fill it with food.
It’s wider than the Sendero – 25% wider, I suspect, since it sleeps 5 rather than 4. It’s tall enough to stand up in but doesn’t somehow feel quite as palatial as the Sendero, although that might be that I’m feeling some bias due to the miniature porch. It doesn’t have any mesh windows but it does have two reasonably large plastic ones at the front, so you can see out a lot better. It has a couple of vents in the front and one in the back – the Sendero only has the one in the back because it has the mesh window in the front.
But again, my main complaint is the door. No one has ever mastered the art of making a good tent door! This one is similar to the Sendero in that it’s a full-size front door which rolls up to open the entire porch up in good weather. There’s no gap between the bottom of the door and the “doorstep” at the front of the tent. But this one has the porch groundsheet built into the inner and although it hooks onto the inside of the outer in each corner, it’s got the usual five-foot gap between the front corners where nothing is held together. It needs a couple of extra loops on the outside so it can be pegged down properly and it needs some loops and toggles on the inside so the groundsheet and front can be held together properly. It’s nothing insurmountable but I don’t understand why the manufacturer didn’t just do it in the first place.
I think that’s all my criticism of the tent itself. The front edge and size of the porch, and if I’d gone out and bought this tent myself, I’d have chosen the porch size and therefore wouldn’t be criticising it, so that’s not really a fair complaint. But I think I did figure out why it got abandoned.
First, there’s a loop missing in the back corner where the bedroom compartment hooks onto the outer. Fine. Those things do fray and fall off occasionally. I’ve repaired at least three in my 2-man. I’m a little surprised that it’s fallen off after – judging by the colour of the ropes – just one use, but that’s fine, these things happen. Second, there’s a dead bug attached to the netting inside. I was also too squeamish to touch it to remove it but it’s definitely dead and it didn’t get in the way (I slept on the opposite side) but I can see that someone might run screaming from it, especially if it was still alive at the time. But again, why go to the effort of flattening the tent if you’re running away from a scary bug?
And third, and most importantly, the front door zip is temperamental. It’s fine if you treat it slowly and gently but the moment you’re in a rush, one of the two-way zips will malfunction and either refuse to move or it’ll move, leaving the zip still wide open behind it. This inevitably happens under the worst circumstances: a sudden unexpected violent rain shower, the arrival of an unwelcome horse, a freezing cold midnight toilet expedition. It doesn’t happen when you decide to go out for a stroll around the campsite or sit out in the sun, only when you’re in a hurry. I don’t know if it needs repairing or replacing or just to be used slowly but I can imagine that someone might decide the tent is useless if it doesn’t zip properly and abandon it rather than deal with it. But again, why flatten it and take the bag and pegs with you?? Why not just walk away from it?
Conclusion: which one do I like best?
Sendero 4, without a shadow of a doubt, even taking into account that a brand new Cairns 5 DLX won’t have the zip problem which is exclusive to that specific tent. I like the Sendero’s porch a lot more. If you’re going to spend a weekend in a tent, you have to expect that rain or the cold evening will drive you inside at some point and it’s good to have space. Its door is also at a steeper angle – in the Cairns, I found the door tended to get blown onto my knees when I sat in my folding chair in the meagre porch. Ok, if you need to take 5 people camping – or even just 3 or 4, because tents don’t take luggage into account when they tell you how many people can sleep in there – you’ll want a bigger tent but in that case, don’t pick the Cairns 5 DLX, pick the Sendero 6. That extra space is absolutely invaluable. I don’t love the door, I think having a door that zips all the way round is much better but the porch space still wins out.
Bonus: Hi-Gear Easy Pack Tent Carrybag review
I love this bag! This is the best invention ever!
I frequently say that tent bags need to be at least 25% bigger than manufacturers make them. They’re fine when they’re brand new and factory-folded but I have never ever not struggled massively to get a tent back into its bag. This one is a generic bag not meant for any specific tent and those do exist – they take a roughly “this fits most 5-ish-man sized tent” approach to sizing. But this one is oversized and adaptable and it’s meant to be easy.
It’s a basically a cross-shaped piece of nylon. You lay it out and you put your tent on top. If you can roll it nicely, then do, but the big 5-man fits in when it’s pretty much just bundled roughly. I did fold the inner as best I can because that’s the bulky bit but I just dumped the outer on top. You find the two sides, pull them over and clip them together on top using the two straps on each side. These have buckles that you can slide up and down the straps to fit, so the tent can be held tightly together or the buckles can be clinging together for dear life but as long as they’re done up, the tent is contained in one direction. Actually, in the case of the Cairns 5 DLX, the buckles are pulled as tight as they can be and the bag is still a bit loose, so this is definitely for big tents. I wish they’d make a smaller version because my 2-man could do with a new bag but it’ll just slide out the sides of this one.
Once you’ve got the sides pulled across, you do the same with the tops – fold them over your bundle, clip the straps together and tighten. Once again, my 5-man tent is too small to pull the bag properly tight around it but between the two sets of straps, one going across horizonally and one going across vertically, it does hold the tent inside the “bag” well enough to waddle across a campsite holding it without it all falling out. In other words, it’s the simplest and best-fitting tent bag I’ve ever used! All tents should come with these things! I immediately ordered a second one for the Sendero but I haven’t been brave enough to pull it out of its Ikea bag to wrap it up yet.
And now I need to cross my fingers for this eternal winter to end so I can actually go out and camp without freezing!