At campsites and festivals, we get inquiries about our tent, the Vaude Badawi II. When it appeared in the background on the BBC camping documentary Britain Goes Camping, Mumsnet lit up with curiosity.
The sand-coloured Vaude Badawi II is a pyramid rising to a ventilated apex, with three bedrooms sloping off the sides. The designer Tommi Langowski was inspired by the old pyramid tents used by expeditions. He improved this classic design by removing the central pole and replacing it with an ingenious four-legged spider pole that provides supportive ribbing for the roof. As a result, the living heart of the tent is roomy, high and uninterrupted.
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Unlike the big family tunnel tents, the bedrooms are low-ceilinged and modest which makes them much warmer if you are camping out of summer season. Sleeping in the inner tent is like being in a small two-men tent. Step out into the living area and there is plenty of well-ventilated living space. The groundsheet and fly sheet are not stitched together, leaving a gap of about two inches between the grass and the bottom of the fly sheet. As long as you peg the fly sheet so that rain runs straight off the tent and into the ground, the interior remains dry. I prefer not having an integral groundsheet: the tent is less likely to rip and the air circulates freely so that even on a scorching morning, the interior remains cool.
The Vaude Badawi II weighs just shy of twenty kilos and we use it to sleep three children and two adults. Over two years, we have taken it out about twenty-six times, to tiny campsites and festivals. The only flaw is the little rain hat that balances upon the apex of the tent, which is effective but almost impossible to pitch tidily or with any dignity.
Vaude’s website, as of 2011, lists just the Badawi and the Badawi Long as current tents, but the Badawi II is still available.
You should not be sitting in your tent peering out at your neighbours through a thick sheet of plastic. I don’t want a tent with a wardrobe either. Or a carpet. Outwell’s wall-to-wall carpet comes in a box illustrated with a picture of a happy couple laughing sensuously. Because that’s how in-tent wall-to-wall carpet makes you feel. This is campsite as temporary suburb.
The highlight of the fair was Outwell’s Indian Lake tent, a teepee with a porch, erected around a thick central pole. I would have liked to have a crack at pitching it, to test the promise of it being “easy to pitch and pack”. Like the little conical hat atop the Vaude Badawi II, the peak is meant to aid ventilation, although the design of the Indian Lake felt like a pretentious hotch-potch where the Vaude Badawi II is a more elegant evocation of the nomad. Of the others on show, we like the Vango Tigris 800 and 600 tunnels, cheap and very easy to pitch for a family tent, although the extension looked like a right dog’s dinner slung onto the back. How long before some enterprising firm decides to cash-in on the British habit of suburbanising everything they touch by manufacturing a conservatory that attaches to the side of your tent?