Tent Living

As you'll know from the blog I wrote about my goals for 2020 I'm hoping to become financial fit again this year by getting rid of my debt and building up a savings that would carry me through a whole host of possible challenges in the future.  One of the debts is due to the fact that we had to get a car while we're in New Zealand as public transport is really pretty poor here.  This unfortunately had to go on my credit card and it's important that we pay that off as quickly as possible.  I also can't work while I'm in New Zealand and that means that at the moment we're having to reduce our debts on just one income.

The only way to work around this is by reducing your out-goings as much as possible.  Now I'm not a big spender and most of the things I enjoy doing are basically free, which always helps, but there are other ways we're reducing our spending.  One of them is on food and here we've reduced the amount we eat out to practically never and are having a very vegetarian / vegan based diet.  Cutting out meat definitely helps reduce the cost of things.  The other area is housing costs.  It was difficult enough anyway trying to find somewhere we could rent for the short amount of time that we needed and the total for staying in hostels and AirBNBs would have been pretty high.  We decided that it would just make sense, both time wise and financial, to not rent anywhere but instead camp most of the time and house-sit some of the time and that's what we've done.

Luckily I'm not someone who needs a whole lot of comfort in my living quarters to be happy.  Relatively comfy place to sleep, somewhere I can hygienically go to the loo, and hopefully somewhere to wash myself is pretty much all I really need.  Vast amounts of indoor space and all the mod-cons has never really been my thing.  That meant that camping has been a pretty easy choice for us, but here's how we made it as comfortable as possible.

It's been great to find places in the area that we've been able to camp for free and even better that these places have toilets that are available to the public 24/7.  This has definitely been a real find, especially as it's meant we haven't had to rush to the nearest town every morning and instead allowed us to have a more relaxed morning routine.

Not all of these camp sites have showers and, if they do, they don't always have water all the time.  But it's turned out to be pretty easy to find places where you can shower for relatively cheap.  I mainly use the app Camper Mate for this and if you're camping or caravanning in New Zealand or Australia at any point I'd recommend it.  It covers a lot more than just places you can shower, but also public toilets, where water is available, places you can dump your grey water, camping and caravan sites, etc.  I've also found that, unless I'm doing some actually walking that day, I don't really need to shower daily and I feel just find with that.  In fact my skin normally thanks me for it.

As for the tent itself it's three person tent which we got specifically so that that extra person space would give us room to move in and store our bags and belongings.  It also gave us the extra room to put in a blow up bed, a real luxury indeed.  We would have been fine sleeping in sleeping bags on ground matts, but as we were going to be doing this for a while we decided that that extra comfort was definitely worth the cost of a blow up mattress, and it really, really has been.  One thing we did find out though was that air mattresses aren't particularly good insulators and, even in the New Zealand summer, we were still feeling cold at night.  That was until I got us a mattress protector to go under our bed sheet and just that extra layer of fabric has made all the difference to how warm we've been feeling while we sleep.  We also have a number of blankets with us and our sleeping bags if we need them.

We're using a square, roller suitcase to store our clothes in, which sits quite happily beside the air mattress inside the tent and which we leave in the tent at all times.  The reason for this instead of just keeping our items in a rucksack is for ease of access.  If we want an item we can just open up the suitcase 'lid' and do a little bit or rummaging to get at it.  In a rucksack we would regularly have to pull most of the items out and then repack again whenever we wanted something, and that just seemed like a time waster.  As we're not packing up the tent every day and we're using a car rather than our legs to get around the transportable ease that is the advantage of a rucksack were not needed here.

We did have another similar bag to hold all our additional camping gear in and which sat quite happily beside the clothes case in the tent.  However, it turned out to be unnecessary and to take up more room than was needed.  Instead we opted to put the items into smaller bags which we could move around, pack up better in the car, and get into easier when we needed items.

One contains the items we use for food prep, our plates, mugs, and bowls, cooking implements and pans, and the items we use to clean up afterwards.  The other has our stoves, gas canister for cooking, and our cutlery.

Lastly, there are the food containers which consist of one smaller, properly coolant bag in which we keep a chill block which we pop into a freezer whenever we get the chance.  This is for items we need to try and keep as chilled as possible.  The second much larger coolant bag has all our other food and spices in.  It also contains the mason jars and general glass jars which we use to make overnight oats, soak beans, store left overs etc.  I try and keep this as tidy as possible, but as it's not a rigid item at all the products pretty much go wherever they want when you move it.  It's not exactly a big deal though as I tend to keep the amount of food we have pretty low and just buy regularly instead.

For light at night we do have our phones and a couple of torches, but we mainly use this solar light which we put out to charge every day.  It's turned out to be a pretty good buy, though there have been a couple of times where we've run out of power and had to go back to the battery powered light sources.  However, as long as I remember to put it out in the sun every day it works just fine.

And, for one little touch of personality we've added the pray flags I brought at a Himalayan Craft Fair in Scotland and had in the back of my van.  It hangs in between the two entrances and is just nice to have as something that we brought with us from the UK.  Theoretically it's also protecting us, but who knows about that.

That's it really.  Not a lot of things, but actually really very comfortable and I haven't found myself being bothered about staying in a tent for extended periods of time at all.  The most interesting part is working out what you can use for double-duties.  My yoga matt, when rolled up, is also quite a comfortable seats which takes two people easily.  The large, material coolant bag is also quite a good table.  And the inside of the tent makes a pretty good cinema. 

In fact, the only real con I have found has been the sandflies.  Those things are awful and they absolutely love me, to the point where other people around me don't really get bitten at all.  Even repellant doesn't seem to keep them off entirely and they're able to find the tiniest of spots I haven't covered to have a nibble.  Oh well, you can't have everything and I just have to keep reminding myself the scenery is beautiful to wake up to......and it's free!