Matt Down Under

It’s finally warm enough to spend more time outdoors in Hobart and therefore a few weeks ago I bought a bicycle so I can go mountain-biking in Wellington Park on weekends. I’m also looking forward to go hiking again soon, although this summer I will probably be short on time since I booked a trip to Germany over Christmas and New Years - with several days stop-over in Thailand and Singapore - which will eat up all my leave days. Fortunately my boss is pretty flexible with time and let’s me take leave days even when I don’t have leave days left - without getting paid then of course.

Next week there’s a public holiday in Hobart on Thursday, so I’m planning to take Friday off and have a long weekend. Last summer already I was planning to visit beautiful Bruny Island, not far from Hobart, it’s ideal to spend a few days with camping and walking there. Now I plan to take my bike and backpack and cycle down to the ferry on Thursday to have a few nice days on the island (weather forecast so far looks excellent) and cycle back on Sunday.

Unfortunately during the nights it can still be a bit chilly and on the South Coast Track earlier this year I noticed my sleeping mattress isn’t very warm, sometimes I couldn’t sleep because I felt the cold ground through the mattress and the sleeping bag - not great. Also the mattress is so big that it takes up way too much space in my backpack. So on my list for new equipment a new mattress was on top and with the possible trip to Bruny Island in mind, I went to buy a new one yesterday

I did some research about products and in the end decided to buy one from Exped, a company in Switzerland. I heard good things about the Exped DownMat, but I decided to buy the slightly cheaper (and less warmer, but still heaps warmer than my current one) SynMat 7 Pump, it’s the orange one on the photos. It has a pretty cool pump system built-in that allows to fully inflate it on just about a minute. As you can see on the photos it’s only half the size of my old one (and with 940g even lighter), but once inflated it’s much more comfortable than my current one. I never slept very well on the green one, but the SynMat feels very good.

Quality looks pretty good too and a repair set is included, but obviously I can’t say much about longterm durability at this stage. Step by step I try to improve my gear, the next part will probably be new shoes/boots. Bruny Island here I come, I heard they have white wallabies there…