Adventure Travel Tours - Traveling And Sleeping In Comfort
By Anonymous
Adventure travel tours usually mean traveling and sleeping in comfort, with a good adventure travel guide. Unless there are bed-bugs at the hotel. I prefer to rough it rather than feed bedbugs. However you can make sure that sleeping rough is fairly luxurious if you prepare the right way.
At my age pack weight is important and I can no longer carry a monster backpack all day. OK - I admit it...I never was able even to lift one of these backpacks, never mind carry one, even as a teenager. But how can you sleep comfortably without carrying a tent and... other equipment? They won't fit in a back pack!
The people who used a travois would laugh at the idea of monster back-packs. Here in Australia shoppers tow a little shopping cart behind them that is simply an L-shaped frame with two wheels at the bend, and a back-pack strapped to the frame. The wheels would fall off if you went over rough ground, but it gives me an idea.
There are bicycles thrown out with the annual rubbish collection. Why not weld a few bike frames together to create a travois with large wheels? You would have plenty of room for a bicycle pump and repair kit. You would have room for a tent, and camp bed (or hammock) and foam mattress, and space-blanket to keep you warm, and ten gallons of water to avoid death from thirst.
There would even be room for emergency equipment such as a needle and plenty of thread, and scissors, so that you can sew up rips in the clothes you are wearing.
Unfortunately if you plan international adventure travel you can't recycle bicycle frames. But you might be able to find someone on the internet who lives in the country that you will be visiting, who is happy to create a wheeled travois from light-weight tubing for you.
Of course, if you are on a horse, you can have a pack-horse following you to carry all the stuff, without a travois. A camel might be able to carry more, and an elephant... well, you get the idea. A bicycle is less suitable unless you plan to stick to bike trails.
Comfort in adventure travel trips can be enjoyed even in cheap travel. As long as you are well prepared, and wear the right clothes.
In Kalgoorlie you can be sweating at 120F all day and be unable to sleep because of the cold at night. A mylar sheet that is silvered on one side (space blanket) will reflect your body heat back at you well enough for you to sleep in a snow-drift. But I would prefer to wear a padded wind-cheater.
Boots support your ankles. Get a comfortable brand of hiking boot with enough room for two pairs of thick socks. Half-fill your boots with Vaseline, put on two pairs of socks, and for several months before your trip, walk like that for at least an hour each day. In theory, if you plan to hike 20 miles each day, you should be walking ten miles each day in the month leading up to your trip. By that time you won't be getting blisters from your new boots.
Keep a record, together with your GPS locations each day. When you get home you can call up Google Earth and get satellite pictures of everywhere that you visited, and your camera should give you some records of what you saw. It all adds up to a scrap-book that will give you the ultimate luxury in adventure travel tours, in the comfort of your own home.
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