Planning a trek? Here's a camper's guide to summer-tent-living
Tarps: A tarpaulin, a length of good rope and pine-needle mattresses make for cheap wrap-’n-roll shelter that won’t gobble up your wallet. But if you want to surprise the sunbirds with spiffy-synthetic-domicile, your choices are backpacker tents (heavy but cheap), wind- and cold-resistant tents (pricey, light and cosy), family-size (one snorer disturbs all) and pop tents (instant housing for the lazy).
Backpacks: Forget about the internal vs external frame argument. What matters is how your kit sits on your spine after it’s loaded. Also, how well it is balanced. Carrying canned sarson-ka-saag is ok, but a left-leaning knapsack-ka-saag isn’t. Tape down all exposed hooks and loops—they get caught in the branches.
Sleeping bags: Even for the most macabre among us, the Egyptian mummy-style bag isn’t as good a buy as it looks. Why sleep tied up like the dead when you are alive and want to kick? Go for the three-season bag. If you’ve got altitude on your mind, shell out for a few more degrees of warmth. And remember to sleep in the buff—it’s actually your body heat that warms up your bag.
Torches: Pay the big bucks for imported Maglites—they’re heavy enough to be used as weapons. They have a long-range focussed beam; some double up as reading lanterns and they’re suitable for all sorts of habitat, including our intermittently illuminated cities.
From here on, all you need is the most gleeful gadget in the natural world, a multi-utility tool. Like Swati, you too can count the Spartan Swiss army knife and compass Carabineer with 13 implements including compass and corkscrew as one-hell-of-a-designer-lifesaver and sling it as stylishly as you like.