Our friends at The Big Canopy Camp Out are busy gearing up for the tree top event of the year. 

Join us-, as we catch up with them before they set off, once again, to far-flung corners of the world to camp out in the canopy…

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Pets are a big part of the family. That’s why when you go camping it’s hard to leave your furry friends at home. Taking a pet on any outing will have challenges, but if you prepare, prepare, and prepare some more, it will be the adventure of a lifetime!

We’ve put together some helpful tips to make sure you can enjoy the great outdoors with your loyal companion…

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This Christmas, we’ve got you covered. From the Family Camper to the Solo Explorer there’s a Tentsile Tree Tent or Hammock for everyone!

Read our Gift Guide on how to choose the perfect present...

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Trade shows can be hard. There is no escaping that fact. Everyone knows it - the effort and time they take to plan, the building of the stand, the early starts and late finishes, the sore throat from hours of talking. But they are also fun. There is no escaping that fact either. And everyone knows that too – the meeting new people, the making of deals, the working together, the well-earned beer at the end of the day. A conflict of exhaustion and exhilaration. And that is exactly what the OutDoor show was for Tentsile. All of it in one. Four seasons in one day.

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Seems like you guys like honesty. Doesn't usually go hand in hand with corporate strategy these days though, does it? Well, we aren't corporate; we are a tiny start up with a passion for trees and a simple idea.

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As the sun started to sink on a perfect March day, we packed the car with our Tentsile and sleeping bags, squashed blankets and pillows around the seats, and sped out of the city to find friends and trees.  In the thick, new darkness at 7pm, we parked near the woods, the quiet wrapping itself around us as we shouldered our belongings and picked our way by torchlight.  We peered through the shadows as our boots crunched dry leaves, looking out for firelight and the specks of moving torches we knew were ahead.  When we found them, the light dancing up and down the tree trunks made the woods seem to grow and shrink around us, rekindling childhood fears and the hint of magic that travels with them.

In the fire light, two Tentsiles floated at shoulder height, welcoming us with the reflected orange glow.  Inspired, we unpacked ours, letting it take shape quickly between three slim beech trees as we wrapped straps around their trunks, ratcheted everything taut, and finally, with help from the breeze, settled the fly sheet over the top to make our home for the night complete.  Then, leaving our blankets in a heap in the middle, we returned to the fire and ate and talked, mesmerised by dancing flames as the wood smoke permeated our hair and weaved itself through our clothes, the smell of history and outdoor adventures already enjoyed and nostalgically missed.

The moon rose as we sat there, hanging shyly behind the trees at first, then, slowly, putting the fire to shame.  We were wrapped up warm and sleep was hovering around our heads, so we called it a night and hauled ourselves off the ground, wriggling over the thresholds of our airborne cocoons with huge anticipation to make up for little grace.  Sleeping bags arranged and blankets wrapped around us, we lay back revelling in comfort, and in the smugness that comes from being perfectly warm on a cold, clear night outdoors.  The moon by now was high above us, bathing our tent with light so we could see each other's faces and our irrepressible grins.  The wind picked up to sound like the sea, and we fell asleep beautifully quickly.  Insulated and suspended, the tent moved with us as we turned over and stretched our legs, and the trees took our weight and held us safe.  At 3am, we woke to a tawny owl calling, the excitement reaching our stomachs as it painted itself in our imaginations, a hunter in the dark.

In the morning, we woke up early and slipped out into the cold, reviving the embers of the fire to make coffee and breakfast, and to keep in the warmth we'd gathered in the night.  We had lines in the trees, ready for climbing, and we had conversations from the ground to 25 metres up; ascending and descending, eating and drinking, enjoying the woods quietly and looking for signs of spring.  The Tentsiles waited around us, ready for escape from the rain that threatened overhead, or for afternoon naps if the fire was soporific enough for that.  When we packed up to go home, we brushed them down and folded them carefully, back into their bags until next time.  We walked back to our cars through daffodils almost ready to flower and trees getting ready for leaves, and looked at each other knowing the Tentsiles wouldn't need to stay away for long.

 

All photos courtesy of Richard Symonds.

If you follow our Twitter or Facebook accounts you'll have noticed the excitement building around our competition to win a Tentsile Vista over the last few weeks.  With just a few simple clicks, six lucky people have so far become proud owners of our 'portable treehouse' - the new, stackable tree tent poised to take the camping world by storm.  So, without further ado, let's introduce them. Matt Williams, Matthew O'Brien and Lydia Rogers are all outdoor enthusiasts who retweeted us to win, and the winners from Facebook are Johnathan Williams, Anca Stefan and Erin Marie.  We know they can't wait to trial their Vistas, and we can't wait to hear how they get on!  

So, what can our winners expect from their prize?  The Tentsile Vista offers a unique outdoor experience by combining adventure, comfort and a new method of communal camping.  While the basic Vista sleeps three people, by purchasing extra floors this can be tripled to allow for a large group to join the fun.  The roof of the tent is a removable fly sheet that facilitates group star-gazing and spotting shapes in the clouds, and it provides fantastic ventilation as well.  The floor is a spacious triple hammock, accessed via either the hatch in the centre of the floor, or through any of the sides, and it can be suspended above any ground conditions.  With the rainfly roof extending outwards and upwards away from the floor, the porch area is a generous 110 square feet/10 square metres, and the insect mesh creates an additional dry storage space for personal belongings or clothes that have properly endured a hike and need to dry out. Full specifications are available here.  Shipping on the tent is free worldwide, so anyone from anywhere can get their hands on one of these fantastic outdoor homes.

 

Vistas are priced at approx. $680CAD / £380GBP / €480EUR / $720AUD, but if you want to be in with a chance of being the next person to win Tentsile gear for free, follow us on social media to get involved in promotions as they come up.  Our Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/Tentsile and you can follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tentsile - both pages are full of great pictures, anecdotes and information from the Tentsile team and our friends around the world.  

 

To our Tentsile Vista winners, happy camping!  To all our other readers - good luck in future competitions, and keep in touch on Facebook and Twitter - we love hearing from you.

 

 

A major key to comfort when backpacking, but one that can elicit a groan from even the most experienced travellers, is packing light. It’s a skill that can be difficult to acquire, and it’s tempting to abandon all thought of it when you’re not entirely sure how cold you’ll be at night, or which pair of new hiking trousers will actually dry quickest after an unexpected downpour. However, if you put in the extra thought and preparation time necessary to shave extra grams (or even kilograms) off the weight of your pack, your body will thank you for it. Not only that, but the positive effects of reducing back pain, shoulder strain and fatigue will make the whole experience more memorable for all the right reasons. Here’s the Tentsile crew’s list of top tips for keeping your backpack light and your journey comfortable.

1. Be ruthless. There are a lot of things you might think you need, but if you’re honest with yourself, it could turn out they’re actually just things you want. When it comes to clothing, for example, ‘wear one, wash one’ is a good mantra to live by for things like socks, underwear and lightweight t-shirts. For heavier garments like jumpers and trousers, you can easily make do with one of each on short trips.
2. Make things multi-purpose. By being creative about the way you use things, you can drastically reduce the amount of stuff you have to pack. Why take gloves when your spare pair of socks will cover your hands just as comfortably? Do you really need bowls to eat out of when soup, porridge or cereal can just as easily be served in a mug? If you’re really serious about saving weight, you can just bring cooking pots and cutlery and eat straight out of your saucepans, and of course there’s the ever-useful spork if carrying a spoon and a fork is too much.
3. Minimise individual items. For perfectly serviceable cover at night, you can use an ultralight shelter such as the Lightwave Starlight 1 Cuben Fibre Tarp or even repurpose your existing tent by using trekking poles instead of the original tent poles. Even better, you can simply bring a hammock and get some arboreal nights under your belt for good measure. Sleeping bags can add a lot of weight, so try a lightweight option like the Laser 300 Elite Lightweight Sleeping Bag or be really strict and pack only a space blanket. It’s unlikely you’ll want to sacrifice the comfort of a sleeping mat, so go for the lightest one possible - these closed cell foam mats weigh in at 175g and are still great for a sound night’s sleep.
4. Don’t sacrifice safety or comfort. Having a lighter pack but carrying constant worry about what will happen if you have an accident with your first aid kit sitting on a shelf at home is not worth it. Likewise, the benefits of an ache-free back won’t seem so great if you’re shivering all night because you brought only a blanket when you know that you feel the cold and a sleeping bag would have been better. What works for one person won’t necessarily work in quite the same way for another, but if you’re travelling in a group you can get around this. If you feel the cold and need to bring a sleeping bag or a heavier jumper, negotiate with someone else who only needs a blanket and ask them to carry the heavier items of cooking equipment. Team work is always a good thing!
5. Make the pack itself as light as possible. If you’re putting this much effort into reducing the weight of the contents of your backpack, it just makes sense that the pack itself should shed some pounds as well. The Lightwave Wildtrek 60 weighs less than 1.5kg, and of course the smaller the volume of the pack you choose, the less it will weigh. If you go for a frameless pack like the Terra Nova Voyager 55, you’ll be carrying less than half a kilo in pack weight, and it even has removable parts if you want to shed even more grams.

Finally, here are some other recommended purchases for lightweight backpacking in style. For cooking, try the Mimer stove and pan set, which fit inside each other for minimum bulk and, with two saucepans and a frying pan, provide everything you need for meals on the go (apart from the spork, of course). If you’re expecting rain, the Integral Designs Sil Poncho doubles as a tarp with 12 guy points, so it can keep you dry on the move and function as a shelter when you set up camp as well. Another item that many backpackers won’t travel without is a multi tool such as the brilliantly named Leatherman Skeletool, which weighs only 142g and, with both a straight and a serrated knife, would reduce your list of cooking equipment even further.

So, now you know what we’ve whittled our packing list down to, we’d love to hear your ideas. Are there any must-have items you’d sneak into our bags, or have you devised an ingenious system for overnight comfort that’s even lighter than a tarp/space blanket combo? Let us know in the comments below.

Tentsile Vista came to us in a Eureka moment. We've already had Stingray and so we didn't actually aim for a new product but when the idea opened itself we knew we had to jump for it...

It all started as a dream. A daydream more precisely. Imagine this: you are shrunk to a size of a bug (much like Alice in Wonderland) and you have just climbed to the top of a beautiful flower where you are now sitting on a petal comfortably and enjoying the view. (We at Tentsile are very in touch with our silly childhood dreams - you'd notice) This flower could be your new home. It closes at night or when it rains and opens for the sun and fair weather... Bliss eh?

Well, we already had the "petal" - the base layer of Stingray resembles just that. We just had to figure out a convertible style roof. Then I came across a unique structure that hadn't been utilised in the camping tent industry before. A triple pole free-standing arrangement that offers great side views and stays up by itself. Bingo! 

So here it is - (pic 1) a triple layer tree tent - the bottom is pretty much the same as the Stingray - a spacious and well taught triple hammock, the roof is completely detachable 3 pole structure, and the (also detachable) bug mesh can be hooked up to the underside of the roof (Pic 2). Simples!

So what's the fuss all about?

Well, we now have a summer/tropical tree tent that is truly convertible. Suitable for the hottest tropical environment it will give you maximum ventilation even when it's raining. It also is modular - you can add extra floors to create a multi-story layered tree camp. This one - (pic 3) sleeps 9 adults in comfort (note: the top level is a Stingray). The floors will be available to buy separately soon and even Stingray owners will he able to add extra layers to their tree camp.

So my dear ewoks. Enjoy, and may the force be with you! 

 

Epic nights under the stars are often followed by not so epic mornings. If you’ve got to get up and on the trail for more adventures, you’ll need a good breakfast to banish the hangover and set you up for a great day out. Even if everything still tastes of tequila there’s only one thing for it.

Huevos Rancheros, truly the breakfast of champions.
This recipe is gratefully received from the Wahaca restaurant founder Thomasina Miers. Thank you for all the days you saved.
Once you’ve sorted the fire and the coffee out, you will need:

6 tablespoons of lard. Yes lard. It’s the magic ingredient.
1 chopped onion
2 chopped red chillies. Or as many as you want if you know what you’re doing.
3 chopped cloves of garlic. Ditto.
2 tins of tomatoes
Salt and pepper
1 teaspoon of demerara sugar
Plenty of Worcestershire sauce
A handful of chopped tarragon
4 tortillas
4 eggs
Cheese. A pale and crumbly sort works well.

 

How?

Heat two tablespoons of the lard in a wide saucepan and add the onion and chillis. Let them sweat down for ten minutes and add the garlic, cook for a few more minutes and add the tomatoes. Season the salsa well with the salt, pepper, sugar and Worcestershire sauce, and mash the tomatoes as they cook. Leave it on the fire for half an hour and add some water if it gets too dry. You might do all this ahead of your trip and just cook it through on the morning in question which will save some coordination challenges if you’re feeling very rough.
When that’s looking like a salsa, melt another tablespoon of lard in a frying pan and brown the tortillas a bit on both sides, then wrap them in foil and keep them warm on the fire.
Stir the tarragon into the salsa.
Melt all the lard you can spare in the frying pan and get it as hot as the fire will allow. Deep fry the eggs, spooning hot lard over them so they get good and crispy.
Serve up a tortilla with plenty of salsa and an egg and cheese on top then retire to your Tentsile to complete your recovery.
There’s a riddle in there somewhere about a getting a hangover from drinking something ‘on the rocks’, when hanging over some rocks in a hammock.

A Tentsile is a hang over cure for rocks, or anything else for that matter.

 

 

Good morning from the China team. Here we are - our operations manager Matte to the left, our head seamstress Janeu and me - Kirk to the right. 

 

But let's start form the beginning... A year ago Tentsile was produced in the UK in a small workshop in Kent that made parasailing parachutes and other crazy stuff. We quickly outgrew their capacity and had to look further afield for a manufacturing facility as there was nobody else who manufactures camping tents neither in the UK nor in the parts of Europe where we had contacts and spoke the lingo. Eventually I went to visit a factory in China who had made some samples for me in the past and had proven itself to deliver. It was a stab in the dark but we had customers lining up orders and our production could not cope with it. When I landed in China I was greeted with a taste of the 21st century.  A true 21st century. Mega cities, megastructures, bullet trains, world class infrastructure... it slowly dawned on me that China isn't what I've learned about at school any more. The straw hats and bicycles were gone. The bizarre dog eating insect devouring stories that were being recycled in the western media seemed to me to be from another era altogether. 

A year later we outgrew the capacity of our Chinese supplier too and we set up our own factory. Poverty and child labour still exist here in some ways and we were adamant to make a difference for the guys so we plucked some of them up from a shanty town on the outskirts, we loaded their stuff in our car and relocated them to our own newly painted facility. Now they have a kitchen, air con, a washing machine and even some nice plants. Hooray! 

So here is our main floor - there is method to all this madness, let me explain: to the left is where the rolls of fabric arrive, the long table is where it all gets measured and cut, between the columns to the left is where our sewing machines are, the half finished tents get thrown in the middle (yes, we need some more shelves) and you can just make out Janeu sitting on a chair doing quality checks further to the right. Behind her is where we string up and calibrate every tent, and to the far right is the packing area. The large grey bags are full of seatbelt webbing - we use a lot of it so you can sleep safely in the knowledge that your tent won't break if for some reason a baby elephant landed on your lap in the middle of the night.

 

...And here is what we do sometimes (not often enough) to test our tents in the real world. This waterfall happens to be an hour away from us and it's the perfect spot for farting around pretending to be doing important work. Alex is the dive master in the blue shorts whilst I did try to get under the waterfall but the reverse current was too strong so I'm just doing a silly pose of a bearded water god. 

 

 

Tentsile Stingray reaches No.1 of the Christmas list for outdoor equipment at the Camping Insider! 

http://www.campinginsider.co.uk/christmas