AT the end of the classic 1958 book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, author Eric Newby and his companion encounter the legendary writer and explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who famously crossed Arabia’s Empty Quarter with a retinue of Bedu guides. After their evening meal, they began settling down for the night. “The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it,” wrote Newby. “We started to blow up our air beds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ said Thesiger.”
If you’ve been clinging to your old self-inflating model for some inexplicable reason, and it’s been a while since you perused the mattress aisle, prepare for change.
The first thing you’ll notice is most modern mats come with a pump sack, a light bag which plugs into the mat’s inlet valve. You blow into it from a short distance, utilising the Venturi Effect to fill it with air, before quickly closing the end and ‘pushing’ the air through the valve and into the mat. It’s
