My Marmot Peapod Tent

I was just as picky when it came to picking out a tent. When I cycled in Canada and the US, I literally lived inside my tent and assumed I’d do the same in Ethiopia. So I wanted to pick the right tent. It made sense that for Africa, I’d want a tent that would be very cool and have lots of ventilation. But in all the travel books I’d read, it was a common theme that people didn’t have enough cold weather gear. It gets very cold in places at night, especially in the mountains, and Ethiopia had lots of those. And I was trying to balance the need for a lightweight tent with my desire for space. I knew from experience that it’s great to have a really small and lightweight tent, but then the thing is so small that you never want to get inside it, and you never use it. It’s a shelter from the elements and that’s all. I wanted a tent that was big enough to act as a home and perhaps even big enough to put my bike inside with all my gear if necessary.

I very quickly found myself looking pretty closely at North Face tents. No other line seemed to have the level of quality that North Face had. Some came close but none equalled them. One in particular won my heart. It was actually a four-season tent, and so might not have had enough ventilation for Africa, but to make up for that it had two doors and each door took up an entire side of the tent. When you opened up both doors and tied them back, you were completely open to the world. I joked about sitting there inside my tent with both doors open to let the herds of wildebeest move through.

I was making up my mind to buy this tent when I stumbled on a display of Marmot tents (in a shopping mall of all places), and I immediately fell in love with them. They were all the same sand/eggplant colour, which I figured would be perfect for the hot sun of Africa. They packed up into a strange little bag they called the “burrito bag.” This bag packs flat instead of round like most tents, and it keeps the fly separate from the body of the tent, which I thought was a nice touch. The poles and zippers and seams were about as good as they could be made. None of the Marmots had two doors, but I liked them so much that I convinced myself that I didn’t really need two doors.

The roofs were almost all open mesh, which I thought would make them a lot cooler, and on rain-free nights they would be ideal for stargazing. But the best thing of all was the way the poles worked to create a wonderfully chunky, homey space inside the tent. Most tents I’ve seen usually lose a lot of the usable floor space and head space because the walls come up at a really shallow angle. There might be four feet of headroom at the highest point of the roof, but from there it drops off sharply. So not only is much of the space lost, but it also feels really small, smaller than it is.

The Marmot tents were the opposite. They had this big and spacious feeling to them. The poles were arranged in such a way that the walls went almost straight up. And the shape they created was pleasingly irregular. You can kind of sense that from the names they gave their tents: Haven, Sanctum, Gazebo, Monarch, Hoot, Screech, Swallow, Nutshell. They also had expedition tents to compete with North Face’s, and they gave them edgier names like Asylum, Fortress and Citadel.

The tent that suited me in terms of size and weight was called the Peapod. I was first considering the smaller Nutshell, but when I climbed inside the Peapod I knew I’d found my tent. It weighed a pound more than the Nutshell, but for that extra pound it offered incredible room.

While picking out the tent, I had smaller items arriving by the boxload from all over North America. I was in the middle of a shopping frenzy and enjoying every minute of it. It was Christmas every day as I opened newly arrived boxes packed with water bottles, water filters, water purification tablets, mosquito nets, padlocks, tools, toiletry bags, first aid kits, tire patch kits, cooking sets, stoves, fuel bottles, sleeping bags, Thermarests, cycle computers, maps, books, tapes, rope, tire pumps, head lights and tail lights, candle lanterns, mosquito repellant, film, money belts, stuff sacks, bar ends, spare parts, oil, grease, bungee cords, reflective vests, waterproof matches, biodegradable soap, ziploc bags, extra batteries, bike mirrors, bike bells, and the all-important Dromedary Water Bag.

I’m pretty sure at some point in there, I lost my mind. I didn’t know if I was preparing to go for a simple bike ride or build a space shuttle and found a colony on the moon. I had a little notebook in which I kept notes about what I had purchased and what I still needed. Each night, I looked at catalogues and made new lists of the little odds and ends that I needed. Each morning there was another phone call to place another order. The lists began to multiply and breed lists of their own.

All of this activity provided plenty of ammunition for a friend of mine who lived up the street. He teased me about the 150 porters I would need to hire just to move around, but I reasoned that I wasn’t thinking about just one trip to Africa but a kind of lifestyle thing. I was putting together a home on wheels. That kind of image has always appealed to me: the rebel permanently on the road with his sleeping bag lashed to the back of his motorbike or the cowboy with his bedroll on his horse and his six-gun at his side. In movies and TV shows, my favourite character has always been the guy who can’t commit to a house and ends up living in a boat docked down at the lake or river. The guy never pulls anchor and goes anywhere, but that’s not the point. The point is that he could. My bike embodied for me all of these images. It was my motorbike, my horse, my backpack, my boat, my truck, my home.

Of course, when you took a static look at all the gear it hardly looked very “free.” There was just too much of it. It was hard to imagine any of my movie heroes looking quite so romantic and independent lugging around all this stuff. But in all these books and movies, they conveniently manage to skip over the necessities of life like cooking and eating and finding a place to sleep and staying warm and dry. The cowboy will suddenly, magically, be sitting around his campfire with a pot of beans bubbling away. But the next morning, he rides away with no pot in evidence, no firewood, no water, no dried beans and no food for the horse. You never saw him actually wash any dishes or battle tormenting mosquitoes. Sometimes the elements will make an appearance. A thunderstorm will arrive and we’ll get a romantic three-second shot (with soundtrack) of the cowboy astride his horse with rain pouring off his hat, lit up against a backdrop of lightning. What they don’t show is the next eight hours of cold, uncomfortable darkness with the cowboy shivering madly and then dropping off his horse in the grips of a savage fever.

A couple of times while cycling across Canada, I ran into would-be romantic travellers. I remember one very clearly. He was a young guy on a pretty big motorbike. I was camped at a roadside stop and I had a meal bubbling away on my stove. It had been a cold and grey day with a wind and a drizzling rain. This kid drives up on his motorbike with garbage bags wrapped around him to offer some protection from the rain. He was cold and miserable. He had nothing with him. It turns out he’d been taken with this romantic impulse to “hit the road.” He didn’t want to be encumbered with any ‘stuff’, so he just left. He said himself that so far his experience was nothing like he’d seen in movies. He spent most of his time cold and hungry and thirsty and tired. He wished he had a tent and a stove and food and water, but he couldn’t see how he could put all of that on his motorbike. Nor could he see continuing without it, and he was going to go back home.

I assured myself that in my upcoming trip through Ethiopia I would not resemble this young man in any way. I’d chosen every piece of gear with some mistake or lesson from my own journeys in mind. Now it had all finally come together, and it was perfect. It was beautiful. I leaned my fully-loaded bike against the wall and simply stared at it night after night and delighted in its perfection. I couldn’t wait for my first days on the road when I could really test it all out. I saw myself cycling with incredible power and confidence, full of the knowledge that no rock or bump was going to damage those wheels and that no slope would be too steep for those powerful gears. I saw myself setting up camp and dealing with every problem as easily as swatting a mosquito. I could picture the exact moves I would make, the way the tent would go up, the way I would collect and store water, the way I would cook, the effortless way in which I would set up camp and then break it down. No more fumbling around, making do with junk gear.

Yes, I had it all figured out. No detail had been overlooked. No situation could arise for which I wasn’t prepared. This was going to be the perfect cycling journey. Of course, I had no idea what I was talking about. I was going to Ethiopia, and Ethiopia had plenty of surprises in store for me.

Tags: bike, Ethiopia, Ethiopia Bike Trip, tent