Prologue
Door: Elke
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Elke
06 Augustus 2017 | Nederland, Leiden
I have been camping before in Africa and at the time wondered if I would do it again (and frankly was still not completely sure). A very strict rule that I have defined when it comes to camping is that it needs to have added value for me to even start considering it. Zipping my tent open and seeing the Serengeti or another remote place that has not been infested by hotels and real estate, worth considering. Zipping open my tent to see an overweight, sunburned person of undisclosed Northern European nationality sitting on a chair eating a French baguette next to a swimming pool, not so much. This year the choice was between Iceland and Alaska and I figured it best to at least give this camping thing another try without a preceding 30 hour travel, the most extreme jet lag possible, and bears. Really, don’t underestimate the importance of the bears in this decision.
First, of course, with camping there is always a little apprehension about the level of comfort. You know comfort is going to be low, but how low exactly? How clean are the toilets and bathrooms or even worse, will there be any? (Please let there be proper toilets and (warm) showers!) And what kind of chairs will there be to rest on when we come back from a 6 hour hike, as I already know the bed at the end of that day is not going to be comfortable. Then on top of this base-layer, Iceland provides a number of additional climate-related worries. What if it is raining all the time and there is no shelter and there is nowhere to stay warm and dry except in a cramped tent, that will be all damp as well by that time. Honestly, the weeks leading up to this trip were filled with visions fighting the elements.
And cold, there were visions of cold. Bringing me to the worst part, namely my life-long and very severe sleeping bag anxiety. The thought of being confined in a mummy sleeping bag (or any other sleeping bag for that matter) is enough to make my heart start racing. In Africa it was warm enough to zip the bag open and use it as a blanket, except for one night, the night that I tore the seams on the insight of the sleeping bag to pieces. Our destination this year reaches maximum average temperatures of 12 degrees centigrade… during the day! I could not even get myself to think about what that would mean for the nights, but I was sure it implied a zipped up sleeping bag, as there is only one thing that is worse than the sleeping bag and that is being cold during the night.
To deal with some of my demons, I bought a new coat in one of those outdoor stores that should protect me from wind and rain, or at least protect the upper half of me, but with a backpack of 65 L and the advice to bring only 12 kg of luggage (including warm sweaters!), I guess that’s the best I could do. And for the nights I invested in thermo-underwear, hoping that that would allow for the blanket application of the sleeping bag to work. As a fairly warm blooded person I didn’t think I would ever purchase this pinnacle of sexiness (let alone that I would do so in preparation of my summer vacation), but this is what I had to do to at least give myself a fighting chance of a decent vacation.
In the end it turned out that most of this trip was not as bad as I envisioned…
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