Water treatment.

For a detailed analysis of the various options for obtaining pure water on a major campervan trip see here.

To see what we did on the China 2002 trip and how well it worked look below.

The five Anglophone vans used a combination of three methods to produce pure drinking water. These were chemical treatment, filtration and buying bottled drinking water.

The chemical treatment selected by four of the five vans was Sanogene® (based on chlorine dioxide in a two-part sachet.) Unlike other chemical treatments Sanogene was found to be easy to use and totally tasteless. Nobody using Sanogene became ill during the trip! Strongly recommended. Each van using Sanogene took 120 sachets for the trip, enough to treat about 12,000 litres of water.

The water filtration technology used by four of the five vans was the Nature-Pure Ultrafine™ Water Purifier from General Ecology Europe Ltd. Recommended. Most van used three filter elements for the 7-8 months of the trip.

Rather surprisingly bottled water was readily available in most places and although expensive so are the elements of Nature-Pure filter (say $70USA each).

Stephen Stewart.