BACKPACK

I haven't yet decided whether I made the right choice of backpack for this hike.  

I can tell you that I chose a marvellous pack; one that exceeded all my expectations and opened my eyes to a world of possibilities. I can tell you that I don't have a single complaint about my pack; it performed flawlessly and was a genuine delight to carry.

My Dilemma

The critical requirements for any hiker are:

1. Boots. Without them, you're going nowhere.
2. Water. Without some form of hydration system, you won't get very far.
3. Maps. Without them, you won't know where you're going.
4. Pack. On a day hike, the above three may suffice, but for a longer duration, you'll need to carry gear. All of the items below need to be carried somehow.
5. Sleeping kit. Becomes necessary for many overnight stays. 
6. Shelter. Usually a tent or bivouac with poles and pegs for camping-based hiking.
7. Cooking. A kit that usually includes a stove and fuel, cooking and eating utensils.
8. Food. Often dehydrated but sufficient to cover several meals.
9. First Aid kit. Often these are customised by hikers towards their most frequently needed components.
10. Clothing. Contingency-based to accommodate cold, hot and wet climate conditions.

Given its criticality, I chose my pack early in my gear selection process. I did my research carefully, worked out which design I thought would suit me best, read all the trail reviews and then ordered a good pack that would comfortably contain all the gear I intended to carry. That was a fundamental mistake.

Then I went about acquiring the rest of my gear. I bought a great tent which, when I pitched it in a local park proved to be strong, spacious and light.  I already have a very good sleeping bag, but I bought the most suitable inflatable sleeping mat for my purposes along with a miniature air pump for it. I bought winter hiking clothes like a good fleece, balaclava, waterproof gloves, thermal layers and included my existing down parka. I carefully selected cooking and eating gear, my first aid kit components and a bag of suitable rations. I had a fantastic array of gear at this point.

A fantastic array of gear for 'wild' hiking

Then I weighed it. It came in at about 16.5kg packed weight. That was 60% heavier than I wanted to carry. So ... time for a rethink. 

Fortunately I have some good friends who have walked the Camino more than once, and they gave me some sound advice. "Forget the sleeping bag and the sleeping mat. Stay in auberges and chambres d'hôtes. That will lighten your pack". I took this advice, but not entirely at face value, as I knew I was not walking the Camino, and I may not have access to the same overnight resources. Also, there is a well-documented issue of bed-bugs in auberges that worried me. I resolved to still take my silk sleeping bag liner as a fall-back.

The most sensible course of action, at this point, was to plan the hike in more detail and then customise my gear to its particular needs. Without overburdening you with the details, the key decisions were these:

• plan the hike carefully, using detailed digital maps, and working out the actual distances to be walked each day, so that the daily start and finish points could be established. This isn't as easy as it might sound, as canals meander through the countryside and ordinary mapping systems just provide point-to-point or road distance measurements. I needed to acquire special tools and then spend long hours making detailed plans, hard choices, careful decisions. At the end of this process, my hike was three days longer than I initially anticipated.

• Fix the dates for the hike, using flight availability between Malta and Marseille as well as Malta and Toulouse as the base parameters. Try to avoid the heat of what has been a strong European summer, and also avoid the cold shock of a European winter. Mid September 2022 would still be hot in southern France (in Malta still in the high 30's), but cooling down. Mid October in France could be in single digits. This was quite a balancing act.

• Book accommodation at each daily junction point. This meant working through a range of different booking engines but significantly, it meant choosing venues that were close to the walking trail and not requiring long detours at the end and start of each day. It also meant locations that were close to village cores, where some access to a meal might be found, without a long hike between the bed and the meal - these factors often required unwelcome compromises and acted to diminish the options open to me. 

• Pre-plan (but not book) where an evening meal might be found. I had been forewarned that restaurants may not necessarily exist where they appear on maps, they may have closed permanently, closed temporarily due to the pandemic, or closed seasonally as tourism diminishes later in the hike - so attaining a measure of reliability in this was cumbersome, but not impossible. France's Geoportail is a more current and more frequently updated version of Google Earth and was a big help.

• The upshot of all this is that I excluded from my kit: 
• my sleeping bag, sleeping mat, air pump, tent, tent poles, tent pegs and groundsheet, as I relied on pre-booked accommodation. I still carried my sleeping bag liner in case of bedbugs, but that was not needed in the places I stayed.

• my portable gas stove, gas cylinder, cooking pots, second water bottle and my complete bag of rations, as I planned to rely on purchased meals.

• my winter clothing including beanie, balaclava, sealskin gloves, thermal top & leggings and Berghaus fleece. I replaced my down parka with a lighter down gilet. In the end I retained my gaiters, waterproof jacket and pants;  they were all used to good effect. I made the decision that if the weather turned seriously cold, I would buy a fleece en route, rather than carry one. Good decision - I didn't need to do that.

• my two pairs of heavy walking shorts and heavy duty walking pants. I replaced these three items with another pair of lightweight walking pants with zip-off legs. I also dropped two spare pairs of walking socks, still leaving me enough options but requiring me to launder more frequently.

• My revised pack weight 10kg, which was far more manageable. It would become 11kg when the water bottle was filled. I started training in Malta with a 16kg pack. I stopped doing so after the first hike! Training with a pack of 11kg worked well - but highlighted another issue. The reduced contents didn't fill the pack well; it was unstable, the contents moved about too much and it became unbalanced and uncomfortable.

• A friend had suggested to me that the one item he missed on his Camino walks was a foam mat to sit on when taking short breaks. I bought a simple folding foam mat from Decathlon and instead of strapping it below my pack, I inserted it down one half of the main pack body, then packed my other gear alongside it. It weighed almost nothing, but it provided structure to the contents, shape to the pack and allowed the compression straps to do their job in making the system tight and secure. I never did use that foam mat; the canal walks don't really require it in the way that the Camino does. In hindsight, I could have filled that space with my comfy Berghaus fleece. It might have given me a few more clothing options - but really, that's splitting hairs.

The pack I chose was an Osprey Atmos AG 65. 

My backpack

This is a 65 litre pack with an Anti-Gravity suspension system, an adjustable, weight-bearing hip belt, an adjustable torso frame that positions straps according to the wearer's torso length and a host of features like side-access water bottle pockets, stow-on-the-go trekking pole holders, full-width map pocket and so much more.  If I carry on, I'll sound like an ad for Osprey, which I'm not.  But these features are not just nice-to-have. They made such a difference to my carrying experience that, even as an experienced hiker, I was blown away by the difference they made.

Having now walked with an AG system for over 400km, I will never again wear a pack without one. This takes a little time to set-up properly beforehand - but you only need to do it once. Customise the pack to your own body before you begin. I adjusted the harness so that the straps properly aligned with my shoulders when the hip belt was secured. I adjusted the weight-bearing element of the hip belt so that it closed well over my hip bones and still had an element of adjustability at the buckle. I adjusted the load lifter straps which transfer the weight from my shoulders to my lumbar region. 

The technically complex and ergonomically delightful elements of the Osprey Atmos AG 65 pack.

The result of taking this time and paying this attention to the technology is that the weight of the pack is transferred from your shoulders to your hips: from your musculature system, to your skeletal system. Bones are far stronger than muscles and are intended for weight bearing. When properly fitted, my shoulder straps carried no weight at all - I could slide my hand comfortably underneath them. The straps ended up simply stopping the pack from falling backwards. All the weight was on the hips - and the body perceives that as equivalent to about a 50% reduction in pack weight!  The difference between when I picked up my pack by hand to put it on, and when I had it strapped on to my hips, was hard to comprehend. It really was that good.

There are zipped side pockets in the body of the pack where I kept my toilet kit, my first-aid kit and my lunch rations for easy access. There's a separate lower pack, intended for sleeping gear, but I used it to stow my waterproofs, gilet and dirty laundry as they too could be accessed without opening the main body of the pack. There are spacious belt pouches where I kept all the bits I might want to access without removing my pack, like suntan lotion, mosquito repellent, a compass and pocket knife, paracord, earbuds, Platypus water filter, spork. There's a bonnet pouch (top-lid pocket) big enough for a pack cover, insect net, my 10" tablet and charger plug, wallet.

So ... why am I unsure about whether I chose the right pack? Only because, on this hike, I had filled half the pack with fresh air in the form of a foam mat I didn't use. I could have carried a much smaller pack, if I had left this choice until later in the selection process. However, the Osprey Anti Gravity system is only available in two capacities 50 litre and 65 litre. For camping, this pack will continue to be brilliant, but if I were to do another randonnée where I stay in accommodation and eat in bistros, then I would probably invest in the 50 litre pack (or maybe even smaller, if Osprey extends its AG system further across its range).