F
or more than twenty years, HEMA
has been mapping Australia using
a solo vehicle without a trailer,
sleeping in a simple dome tent or
swag and cooking on a simple gas burner
screwed onto a 2.5kg gas bottle.
A trailer was always seen as overkill; a
restrictive ‘ball and chain’ on our freedom to
explore. Just another axle and set of tyres to
protect, a cumbersome weight in technical
terrain which would inevitably, one day, lead
to us being hemmed-in down a dead-end
track with no way to possibly turn around!
But now a trailer has become essential
part of all our long-haul mapping adventures,
basically for reasons of workplace health and
safety, specifically managing GVMs. With all
the mapping gear, equipment, tools, food,
water, fuel and camping gear we require,
there’s hardly a solo vehicle left on the
market that has the payload needed for even
the most basic of our mapping expeditions.
Plus, there’s the big advantage, with a
camper, of being able to set it up as a base
station from which to conduct trips out to
local tracks and sights, then return at night
to cook, work and sleep in relative comfort,
getting ready for another day of mapping.
So, what does the ultimate expedition
trailer look like to us — and does it actually
exist?
Here’s the top five things we look for, and
won’t compromise on, in our reckoning of
the ultimate expedition trailer:- QUICK SETUP
- SIMPLICITY
- OFFROAD DURABILITY
- COMPACT AND LIGHTWEIGHT
- BASIC CREATURE COMFORTS
QUICK SETUP
As the old cliché goes ‘time is money’ and
in our case, that’s real dollars spent on
professional teams and data collection. An
extra hour a day to setup and pack down is"IT’S A SIMPLE CASE OF SIZE, AGILITY AND POWER-TO-WEIGHT RATIO. AND JUST LIKE YOU DON’T WANT
TO BE STUCK IN THE SPIRAL SLIDE AT A MACDONALD’S
PLAYGROUND YOU DON’T WANT TO BE CAUGHT HEAD-FIRST
DOWN A FORESTED DEAD-END TRACK OR STUCK HALF-WAY
UP A HILL CLIMB LOSING TRACTION BY THE SECOND."Go anywhere capability is de-rigeur