Inside, Outside Or On Top? The Path To Peaceful Sleep...

Whether you’re a weekend camper, holiday adventurer or hard-core overlander who stays out for months at a time, your sleeping solutions will vary widely.

Ground tents, roof-top tents or interior sleeping accommodations all have their pros and cons. In this column, we discuss some of the issues faced by campers and how to deal with them.

Interior camping

I remember a horrific story my father told of a French family that he knew who were camping in Zaire (now the DRC) on a Cape to Europe trip. The parents slept in a roof-top tent, and the two kids below in the Land Rover. Needless to say, they were attacked in the middle of the night and the parents were helpless, as men with machetes stood at the base of the ladder. The fact is that, in populated areas throughout Africa and the world, human attack is far more likely than an attack from an animal, and in such situations, it’s often imperative to leave quickly. For this reason, it makes sense for overlanders who are uncertain of their next overnight stop to organise sleeping arrangements which give direct access to the cab. The theory is that one can drive away from trouble.

One way to achieve this set-up is simply to have a large vehicle like a Unimog, Land Rover Forward Control, Iveco Daily 4x4, Sprinter 4x4 or similar, which gives you plenty of space to move about inside. You are ready to sleep, cook or move along, without having to leave the vehicle.

The downside to the extra space is that the vehicle won’t fit in a standard container for crossing oceans, will struggle in narrow bush, is too tall for forested or overgrown regions, and may be too wide to fit in many tracks. Recovering a large vehicle is also much more difficult.