My leather boots are tired. I've never treated the leather since I was in Kyrgyzstan where the granite scree tortured them mercilessly. Since then, they've languished in both the tropics and desert.
I visited a camping store in Singapore today to find a tin of leather-rehabilitator wax. Singapore is perhaps the worst first world country to buy any sort of outdoors equipment. There is no market for it, it has to be shipped here at great expense, and since it's a captive market the markup is enormous.
So I bought a tin of wax and browsed around some more. I saw that they sold sleeping bags, but the price labels were wrong. They were horrendously cheap. But on talking with the salesguy, I found out that yes, in fact, some of the sleeping bags (both down and synthetic) they sell are store brands, and are horrendously cheap.
To cut a long tale short, I was able to buy mom, dad, and matt +10C bags that compress remarkably well. I bought three $65SGD bags for with a 15% discount. Check out REI and you'll see that compares very favorably with some of their synthetic bags.
Sure there are some tradeoffs, and these things aren't ideal, but they work for purposes. For one thing, they avoid you all having to use rented sleeping bags of very uncertain provenance. Although a 0c bag would have been best, if it's too cold, just wear socks and a fleece to top off. In Matt's case, it's possible that the bag won't be long enough. If so, Ling and he can switch. I bought her a Long bag.
We are precipitously close to being able to tell Jol that we don't even need his swags. The only thing holding us back is that we don't have sleeping pads for the three of you.
Thermarest pads are very expensive. The alternative, foam pads, were $85 in Singapore -- a fucking ripoff. If any of you guys can find some cheap alternative (Matt probably is most likely to be able to in California), then we can do without the big, stinky swags. (Those pads are nice in their own right, for just being able to sit on the ground comfortably.
I didn't mention it earlier, but I got a second tent, a very lightweight 2-person job. My current tent is a tight 3-person squeeze. So we're able to ditch Jol's tents, too. (you picked up that tent, MWE?)
Otherwise, we're getting closer, closer. Besides deciding which Jackie Collins Book-on-tape we're going to listen to, we're basically on countdown now. This weekend I'll start tidying up remaining tasks, but they're all pretty minor at this point.
Posted by Nils Blutig at August 8, 2003 02:48 PM | TrackBack