When you travel with a camper van, certain things become luxury. I am sure many of you know what I am talking about…
Hot Water, or simply water is one of them. We have a 40 l “drinking water” tank for brushing teeth and preparing tea or coffee (so far we drink bottled water only), which we find is a very reasonable amount and it takes us weeks to use it up. We have another 80 l tank for washing the dishes, taking a shower etc. Have you ever tried to take a shower with only 80 l at home? It is unlikely that you get to the stage where all soap is off your body, let alone your hair… So taking a full (and hot) shower becomes something more special for us. And between people that travel like us, the water quality, shower cleanliness and hot water availability becomes an important evaluation criteria for camp grounds.
Another little luxury is air Cooling. We have it in front and find it very useful when you travel in countries around the Equator! We don’t have it for the cabin in the back. No issue during the day, since we live very pleasantly outside :-). Most of the nights the temperature inside the cabin drops below 24°C, but in some very hot areas it stays around 30°C. So up to you if you prefer to sleep at 29°C or you open all mosquito screens to let in a little more air and then live with the interesting number and varieties of mosquitos you can find in hot and humid climates…
Heating is another one. Even if we are close to the Equator and one should think no heating is required, those of you that know South America know that you climb up to impressive altitudes in the Andes (we are currently in Potosi at 4000m) where temperatures can easily drop below freezing point over night.
Not an issue if you have a good sleeping back, but taking your breakfast at 4°C inside the camper van is maybe not the thing you dream to do during a lot of days. Many of the travellers we meet don’t have heating, but we do!! So just before getting up in the morning we switch on the heating and have a cosy breakfast with hot coffe or tea for me and a hot chocolate for Michel :-).
Unbelievable how much you come to appreciate “basic” things!
Last but not least, Space is probably the biggest luxury in our little camper van. One thing is the space to move inside the cabin. Best thing to operate is one of us stays seated or go outside, while the other one washes dishes, brushes teeth etc.
Another thing is the stuff you decide is essential to take with you and fill the limited storage space of your camper. One thing is certain, you and your partner usually don’t agree on what is really essential 🙂 . A stock of chocolate that uses a good part of the fridge is a good example, or too many cloths for the same weather is another one, or do we really need real wine glasses and a vacu-vin (hand vaccum pump to store open wine bottles) and how about curry paste for green, red and yellow curry, and a selection of Indian curry mixes (the latter extremely delicious thank you Behroze!).
Below a few more:
1) To prepare our trip, we took an extended First Aid course (i.e. what to do if the next hospital is a few days away). Excellent course we found, with lots of recommendations what to do and what to take with you. As a result we have a great stock of medicaments etc.
Question is, do we really need all this or did we overdo it a little?
2) I also did a best guess on what Shoes I need (hiking, visiting cities, beach, busy days, lazy days, hot weather, cold weather, camp ground, etc). Somehow Michel came to 5 pairs and I to a few more, suppose this is normal 🙂 but it does take a bit of precious space and we could have probably done with a few less…
3) If you like Reading, and we both do, you imagin lots of time for this during 1 year. So Michel’s solution was to obtain an eBook reader from his colleagues and load as many books as possible. My solution was to create a big heap of all the great books I had intended to start reading over the last years and painfully select a few. In addition to this we needed a minimum of travel and hiking guide books. So the result is a few kilos of paper.
The travel and hiking guides are definitely very useful so far and the in fact little time we find to read creates fantastic cosy moments comfortably installed in the shade or just a few minutes before breakfast…. (I am currently reading a great book that my sister gave to me: The Name of the Wind, very hard to put the book down and stop reading…)!
In hindsight, we don’t have as much time as we thought for reading and everybody we meet is proposing to exchange books, so I could have probably taken a little fewer books, and I think Michel violently agrees. But then again, I really really wanted to read the ones I took…
4) Michel did a great selection of tools for the car and electronic measurement equipment. I think it is a little over done, but are not sure Michel agrees with this…
Afterall, we will only know after coming back what we really needed. Just like every holiday suitcase packing we probably have a lot of stuff we don’t need. But how do you exactly know which part of what you pack you will or will not need?