Gear
Gear

Gear

Planning what to take, to a continent we’ve never been to, living for a year on bikes without much real bike touring experience, is a bit of a tall order. I won’t go through everything we’re taking in minute detail, just some of the bigger item and decisions that people might be curious about. As always we’ve settled on some kind of compromise between weight, comfort and utility. Coming from ultralight hiking it’s nice to have a bit more capacity to carry things, but since were are just taking so much more stuff I was too lazy to weigh it all.

Inevitably there will be items which we bring and never use (hopefully we can recognise these and ditch them in good time) and other things we wish we’d brought. As with anything outside of ones knowledge and comfort zone, we’ll just need to get out there and learn for ourselves.

Bikes

It seems that people who do this kind of trip have one of three kinds of bike:

  • A modern bikepacking bike: big tubeless wheels, minimal streamline bags, an internal gear hub or 1x drivetrain.
  • A traditional touring bike: smaller 26″ wheels with inner tubes, racks and panniers, 2/3x drivetrain.
  • Whatever bike they can afford: old and hopefully reliable, fitting on whatever cheap or 2nd hand bags however they will fit.

Our bikes fall quite squarely into the 2nd of my arbitrary categories. In hindsight maybe a sleeker more modern style of bike might have been better, but when I started learning about bikes I thought something more traditional with more easily replaceable parts seems like a safe choice. And given that plenty of people have completed similar journeys with bikes from the 3rd category, I’m pretty sure we can work with whatever we take.

As mentioned in my maintenance post, Lina and I have very similar bikes (Böttcher Expedition and VSF Fahrradmanufaktur TX-400):

  • 26″ wheels
  • steel frame
  • Shimano deore shifters, 3×10
  • Magura hydraulic rim brakes

Tent

We decided to take our cheap old chinese tent. We love it, and it means one less thing to buy. If it makes it to the end of our trip in Africa, it will have lived a good life. To help improve its chances, we’ll be bringing along various patch kits, duct tape and for once the groundsheet.

Cooking

For cooking (it’s yet to be seen how often we’ll cook vs eating from roadside places) we will be taking a multi-fuel stove (MSR Whisperlite) for versatility. It can run on petrol, that we’ll be able to get everywhere. It is however much dirtier than the gas stoves we’re used to, and gets caked in soot.

Water

We have a couple of Sawyer water filters from previous trips, so we’ll take one or both of these. I’d like to think this will help us avoid some plastic waste, but who knows. In some places we will just have to buy bottles of water. As a back up we will also take some water purification tablets.

As for capacity, I have designated space for about 8 litres, Lina somewhat less. But we can always pack or strap on more bottles if needed for the desert sections.

Camera

To try and got some nicer photographs I’ll be taking along my Sony A6300. For those not that into cameras it’s a “cropped sensor” camera, so a little smaller than the ones you’d typically see from serious photographers, but still with the ability to change lenses and producing “RAW” files that give more leeway for editing. I will only have one real lens with me, a Sigma 18-50mm f2.8. Besides that I have a disposable camera lens that takes fun retro pictures.

For quick opportunistic shots and any videos we might want to take we have our phones. For long exposures, or pictures of us both I’ll have one of those flexible tripods (a GorillaPod 3k).

Luxuries

Lina’s unnecessary but nice-to-have item is a Helinox chair (zero). At 500g it seems like a nice upgrade in comfort. I’m sure that I’ll be jealous often enough on my child’s size stool.

My main “luxury” item will be my travel sketching kit. I very aspirationaly aim to do some drawing and painting along the way. I’ve set many art goals in the past and have never met any of them, so I’m curious to find out how much I’ll be able to keep it up this time.

Feel free to ask any other gear questions below. If I’ve forgotten something interesting or important I can always add it to the post.

3 Comments

  1. Bob Tarzey

    Sounds amazing, I have my light weight walking kit finely honed these days. Still I just totter round the UK, not brave enough to head out across Africa. I hope the adventure is as fantastic as it sounds, cheers Bob

    1. This time we’ll each have 2 sets of clothes, one for on the bike, one for off. My on-the-bike clothes are the same ones I’ve done all my hiking in, a nylon long-sleeved shirt and shorts. I will also have some dorky zip-off trousers if I want to completely cover up from the sun.

      Lina’s clothes are similar, but a bit of an experiment for her.

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