A. Your going to get very wet

B. Once wet your clothing is going to stay wet

However if you fail to get yourself dry every evening it’s a matter of a few days before you suffer ‘immersion foot’ become host to a catalogue of fungal infections. There is little point in hanging your clothes up to dry as the humidity results in them remaining just as soggy when you return for them as they were when you put them up.

So how do you stay dry every evening in an environment where everything is conspiring to keep you a moist fungal haven?

In the jungle it is standard practice to travel with just two sets of clothes; one set is worn during the day and remains perpetually wet, the second set you keep dry at all costs.

Every evening you peel off your sodden clothing, dry off and carefully remove your dry clothing from its sealed bag to change into before rolling into the safety of your hammock and dowsing yourself liberally with antifungal powder. In the morning you face the unpleasant task of leaving the dry sanctity of your hammock and changing back into your wet clothes to face another damp day, making sure that your dry set is sealed away in its dry-bag.

In reality your dry set of clothes becomes your smelly clammy set, but changing into them in the evening will feel better than sliding between freshly pressed linen sheets after a day in your stinking, filthy, sweat saturated day clothes.

Wearing the same set of clothes day after day whilst slogging through a jungle is about the harshest treatment a set of clothing is ever likely to endure, rattan tendrils armed with rows of backward facing fishhook spines tear at you as you try to pass and a constant barrage of rain and mud results in your clothes literally rotting off your back, for a set of clothing a single month in the jungle equates to an entire lifetime of abuse under normal conditions.

So naturally when Edgar Brothers sent us their Royal Robbins 5.11 tactical range of clothing and asked us to test them we took them on expedition to the jungles of Borneo for two months!

Edgar Brothers provided two sets of 5.11 tactical long sleeve shirts and trousers, one set made from rip-stop nylon and the other set made from 100% cotton canvas.

The shirts are certainly reassuringly robust; in fact the build quality of the shirts is some of the best I have ever seen in an item of clothing. Every seam is not just double but triple stitched, every point of wear is double layered and every stress point is bar tacked and reinforced, it’s almost as if the designers fantasised the shirt might one day need to be pressed into service as an emergency tow rope and so built it to that spec.

The four chest pockets comprising of two bellowed breast pockets and two large dump pockets are very well designed and laid out, the flap on the left pocket has a hole for inserting a pen but this hole serves a far more useful function when used as an attachment point for a compass lanyard for which it serves well or perhaps as a place to keep your spoon. If you really need somewhere to store your writing materials there are a further two pen slots on the upper left arm though I have never had occasion to use them.

The two dump pockets positioned behind the breast pockets are the real showpiece of this shirt capable of swallowing not just maps and A4 documents as one would expect but also able to comfortably contain awkward and/or heavy items as a Gransfors mini axe without distorting the shape of the shirt or being externally visible, thus helping you to maintain your smart and respectable appearance in the bush.

This and other design features such as unbreakable melamine buttons and a well designed vented yoke leaves you in little doubt that the 5.11 Tactical Shirt would be up to the job. The cotton version became an instant favourite and was worn almost daily in UK, I found it most functional when worn over a t-shirt as a lightweight jacket and I rarely felt the inclination to button it up, its pockets which obviously employ the same wormhole technology found in women’s handbags are capable of easily engulfing almost everything I chose to throw into them, it is now set to be my standard summer Bushcraft attire and feels like it will be with me for a very long time.

In the jungle however I chose to wear the lighter weight rip-stop nylon shirt during the day and kept the cotton set as my dry clothes. Over the coming months in the jungle the shirts would meet and surpass my expectations, I was seriously impressed with their performance and other than being irreversibly stained with banana tree sap and other unidentifiable substances they suffered no structural damage at all.

Impressive when you consider that the only piece of clothing I took that wasn’t made by 5.11 was reduced to rags after only a month when a slide down a mud bank introduced them to a particularly ferocious barbed palm.

I had initially been a little concerned that the Velcro used to secure the pockets throughout the shirt might degrade with time but this concern has proved unfounded.

The rip-stop element of the nylon shirt rubs a little where it comes into contact with the skin under the shoulder straps of a loaded backpack during extended walks (6-8 hours) but the nylon shirt is lighter in weight, dries much quicker and less stifling in tropical heat than the heavier cotton shirt which is better suited to British summer conditions and less prone to fire damage. Other than this there is little difference between them and both cover everything you could desire in a shirt.

The 5.11 Tactical Trousers however are extremely disappointing especially after the exceptional design and build quality of the shirts; I was left with the distinct feeling that the designers must have exhausted their creative energy on the shirt and the trousers were merely an after thought.

The trousers are available in cotton or nylon canvas but both have a similar fit and feel to a pair of jeans with all the associated drawbacks, they are heavy, they take an age to dry and cut appears to have been inspired by skateboarders because the low crotch is totally unsuitable for serious walking. They noticeably bind around the thighs and when the trousers become wet this binding becomes so pronounced as to physically restrict your movement to the point where attempting to step up onto a log results in the wearer being forced to grasp the fabric around their thighs and hoist them up like a lady in an evening gown negotiating a puddle.

Whilst they were unsuitable for walking in the bush, the nylon version seemed quite robust and was not nearly as bad as the cotton pair which failed to make it to the jungles of Borneo at all; instead they started to fall apart here in the forests of Wales before I even left.

With the cotton version the brass popper on the fly disintegrated on the first day of use and before the end of the second day the fabric on the seat was already scagged by a minor brush with a snapped branch! Over the following weeks the hems of the trouser legs and pockets were also starting to fray, Royal Robbins must be aware of this problem as I noticed that on the nylon version the pockets had been reinforced at the point where the fraying had occurred.

The one redeeming feature of the trousers was the deep back pockets capable of holding maps and other documents which due the diagonal opening are easily accessed on the move and contrary to intuition do not seem to hinder sitting even whilst in use, however even this feature is spoiled by the fact that the 8.5 inch wide opening to these huge pockets is held closed with a single 1 inch wide section of Velcro leaving over 3 inches either side gaping open for small objects to exit though as I discovered when I hung the trousers up on my hammock line only for the contents of these pockets to spill out into the mud.

There is also a pocket on each thigh where one is accustomed to finding a map pocket, though I cannot fathom what these pockets were intended for. They are far too small to take a map and instead of being rectangular they are square, they are also bellowed so putting anything in them which is not flat results in them bulging out over the knee, the only object I could find which satisfactorily fills them is a CD case!

In conclusion I highly recommend that if you need a general purpose expedition shirt seriously consider the long sleeved 5.11 Tactical Shirt, you will not be disappointed with it and I assure you that you will be pleasantly surprised at how much gear the pockets are capable of engulfing without looking untidy. Unfortunately the trousers are as bad as the shirt is good and I would recommend against them, they are fine for wearing in town but are only marginally better than a pair of jeans in the bush.

The best UK prices at time of print for 5.11 tactical clothing were found at: www.polimil.co.uk