The Mad and the Bad

Some thoughts on the things I was really pleased with and the disasters.

Top marks: Icebreaker 140g weight Superfine T-shirt

Perfect for cycling in a wide range of temperatures up to the max, whatever that may be. Nice to sleep in too and thin enough to dry quickly. I like all Icebreaker’s gear but only this weight is cool enough to remain comfortable in extreme heat. The best place to buy it is at www.outdoorsports.co.nz , they have the entire range, not just the limited UK range and a human being answers your email queries and sends the goods off by airmail pronto. Beats traipsing round the shops.

Pretty good: Sigg 1.5L bottles in Minoura long bottle cages

Sigg bottles are far better than throwaway plastic bottles in my opinion. Plastics don’t last long and are unreliable and leaky. They are very secure in Minoura’s long bottle cages, though I used a cheap carabiner to hold the top bottle in place and put two straps on the cage to support it as the single clamp grip is not really strong enough for a long tour or any off-road riding. I never ran out of water with a 3 litre carrying capacity. You can’t drink while riding with Sigg bottles, but I prefer to stop and drink rather than try to do two things at the same time.

Disappointment: Rab Neutrino Lite down jacket

A favourite jacket of mine at home for its light weight and comfort, Rab’s Neutrino was just too light and delicate for the trip, though useful when up high, no matter where. I planned to use it as a pillow but that meant it was compressed all day and night and after a few weeks I noticed it was suffering from being compressed too long, so I had to take it out and let it decompress every night. It’s such high quality down that they’ve only used 120g of fill and it’s not enough to withstand being in a stuff sac day after day. It’s also not that warm. The problem with producing a really lightweight down jacket is that the biggest weight saving is by reducing the amount of fill. This jacket weighs 400g but for 625g you can get the Neutrino Endurance, it’s got 220g of fill, almost twice as much of the stuff that could save your life, and a weatherproof shell as well, or something similar from MacPac.

Minor troubles: Apple iPod 80 gigger

It’s finicky, this we all know. Apple’s determined to put all sorts of restrictions on it and though it’s brilliant at home, simple is better on the road. I wanted to download comedies and other radio shows and then upload onto the iPod. This means an internet cafe connection and great care to avoid the iPod’s ’syncing’ everything, ie deleting what you’ve got on your iPod. I carried a backup copy of all my music on my hard drive, but found I had to also install and run iTunes on every computer I was using, which is painfully slow. I lost various things on the iPod while doing all this. There are third party programs which are supposed to work with iPod so you can manage it independently of iTunes, but most likely if you try clever tricks like that, your iPod will go into a sulk from which it may not emerge till you get home. It’s great having an iPod, but not wise to ever plug it into an internet cafe computer. Get the USB charger and do it in a hotel.

Major troubles: Nexto M1 ND2325

The Nextodi portable hard drive is a great thing. It will upload your SD cards or Compact Flash cards in just seconds. Just don’t connect it to something dodgy like an internet cafe computer. The first trouble I had was when the host pc crashed while the Nextodi was connected to it. When I restarted, the folder with the photos was missing and I spent the weekend using free file recovery software to get the photos back. But it happened later on in the trip and I hadn’t noticed that the photos folder was damaged as it worked on some computers but not on others. In the end, some computer had decided to call the photos folder a .exe file name, so I couldn’t open it at all. But I’d been uploading photos to it in the meantime, so many of those had overwritten older ones and I’ve been able to recover only a few photos from Iran.