Page 44 - 2019 AMA Summer

KITREVIEW
MANUFACTURER:
ALPKIT
MODEL: ORDOS 2
PRICE TO AMA &
RRP: £255
BIRTH: 2
(COMFORTABLY)
WEIGHT: 1.67 KGS
INNER / OUTER PITCH FIRST: INNER PITCHED FIRST SEASONS: 3
FLYSHEET HYDROSTATIC HEAD: 3000MM
GROUNDSHEET HYDROSTATIC HEAD: 5000MM
RATINGS
FEATURES: 5/5
VALUE FOR MONEY: 3/5 PERFORMANCE: 2.5/5 WEIGHT/SIZE: 4.5/5 OVERALL: 3.5/5
decided this was not the tent for me. An impromptu trip to Alpkit occurred and I ended up impulse buying an Alpkit Ordos 2 during their winter sale for £225. Fortunately for my bank balance, I ended up selling the Laser Photon 1 on, via the same Facebook group for £230 - £30 up on what I paid. Quids-in! (sorry to the chap who bought it, but you were so keen!)
This is a very spacious tent and it’s also still very light given its size. Two people can comfortably sleep side by side in this with ample room to sit up in (tick VG over the Laser Photon 1) and weighs less than my 2Kg weight limit. The only compromise I had to make was that it’s an inner-pitch-first tent. I had hoped to avoid this but given the options I found, it seemed unavoidable at the time.
Well as it happens, this is where things started going wrong. Now I will admit, it does state it’s only a 3 season tent, however, with that I’d still expect it to be able to handle a mild breeze and a bit of rain before wondering if I’m going to have to bug out and tab back over High Street in the dark with a soaked tent and a grumpy spaniel. The story goes that I didn’t and I grizzed the night out while wet and tired, however, I still experienced con- siderable discomfort that I would directly attribute to the tent I had. Packing it away in the wind and rain further confirmed that inner pitch first was a bad idea. Lesson learnt.
The issue was that despite pitching my tent in the lee of a hill behind a stone shelter and not in direct line of rain, the wind still forced the rain around to the back of the tent. For most of the night I watched it bubble through the seams, particularly at the foot where there’s a guy line attachment. Add to this, the rear half of the tent folded in the wind causing con- densation to drip inside or worse, direct contact between my bivi bag and the tent inner.
The pole construction for the tent is made from three pieces. There’s a long central spine that runs from the back on the ground to the centre of the vestibule at head height, a pole that crosses this at the front to create the main shape and the front vestibule. This spans from the floor on one side to the other meeting the spine in the middle. The rear is the same except it floats and isn’t fixed at ground level (on the Ordos 3 it does and is much more stable). As a result it is free to rotate around the central spine, only constrained by the tightness of the inner canvas that it fixes to. In anything more than a slight breeze I found this to rotate around the central spine to the extent it caused the entire tent to flatten.
Needless to say, I lost all faith in the Ordos. I’d used it once and it let me down when I actually needed it. I couldn’t trust it in the wind, it had proven it wasn’t that waterproof and that meant it was insuffi- cient for my needs. I needed something else.
In the time of trying to determine what else I could get, I had an exped on the horizon that required a tent; I had to take
it. Knowing I had to avoid the wind at all costs I found a sheltered spot. While I was putting the tent up, to add insult to injury, the edge of the flysheet caught on the clip of my gaiter and ripped. How do you rip a tent on a pair of gaiters!? The nail in the coffin had been sunk.
I rank Alpkit the following week and listed the issues I was having and stated I wanted to return it for a refund. In the coming week the tent was returned, tested and found to be faulty, not for a fundamentally flawed tent pole design – they state it’s perfectly suitable for what it’s designed for, but the ground sheet, where I had watched the water bubbling through gave an insufficient hydrostatic head reading and consequently my refund request was granted. A victory but not for the reasons I felt most notable.
What next? I had hoped to get a Tarptent Moment DW that had been reviewed by Chris Townsend from Trail Magazine. It
44 / ARMY MOUNTAINEER
Ordos 2