Laptop: Toshiba Satellite 5100-201. It's first test came when a full litre of water washed in through Mandy's sun roof and onto the open keyboard in the UK. It was fine after a night in the airing cupboard. It was sitting open on the centre console during Mandy's roll and survived intact. Since then it's suffered thousands of miles of pot holes, corrugations, and the ultra-fine dust that gets everywhere. A laptop may not be on everybody's list of must brings, but for me it is an essential tool - it allows me to:

• Use Autoroute with my Delorme USB attached GPS (and a bunch of tedious connectors)

• Upload and view my photos from the Dimage 7 (see below) minutes after taking them

• Create wonderful web pages such as these, then connect to the internet at most cyber cafés where I can download useful route info, maps, etc, as well as upload to this web site.

• Synchronise with my O2 XDA, as well as copy emails and maps onto the 64Mb SD card for viewing without getting the laptop out

• Backup photos to CD

• Burn MP3  CDs for use with the Pioneer MP3 system (see below)

• Watch DVDs in the evenings (The Palin Sahara documentary was great). I have a 25 CD holder with a bunch of DVDs.

• And most important of all - play Medal of Honour in the jungle

O2 XDA Phone/PDA. This is a hybrid phone and Personal Digital Assistant. In the UK it uses the O2 GPRS network, but it's GSM compatible and has worked for me in most countries, but not:

• Mali

• Burkina Faso

• Niger

• Chad

• DRC

• Angola

By loading info that I need on a regular basis onto the 64MB SD card (the Toshiba has an SD slot on board) I can easily access useful data including (offline) web pages.

Camera: Minolta Dimage 7. Robust, reliable, idiot proof apparently, eats batteries. I use it with an 1GB IBM Microdrive which holds about 600 photos at a time. It has proved to be robust enough to survive the desert heat, jungle humidity, and the dust around Lake Chad without missing a beat. Let the Windows XP format command anywhere near the disk's File System however, and it will end in tears. Later on it had problems in recognising batteries that were fully charged - cleaning the battery contacts helped. Hmmm.... The volcano that swamped Goma also did for my zoon ring - my fault for getting volcanic ash in it (it was at night though). managed to fix the ring with gaffer tape.

In-Car Music: Pioneer DEH P7400MP. Mandy came with the standard land Rover radio cassette player; using a cassette adapter I could feed a (poor) signal into this beast from either the laptop or a Creative Jukebox 3 (20Gb) MP3 player with car lighter power adapter. In retrospect this would have been unkind to the laptop and MP3 player as they would have got extremely dusty (though the Creative jobby has a pretty good case).

The Camel came with the above unit, which can play MP3s from CD, as well as taking normal audio CDs. The unit has problems with vibration and dust, so we have periods when music isn't possible; the CDs we burn also get scratched easily, so we get a lot of read errors. Still preferable to a separate MP3 player though.

Some people think that the whole point of an Africa trip is to get away from things like CDs, but personally I'd go potty without a little bit of entertainment on the road.

Malpins Metal Detector - 20 quid - never actually used it except when posing for photos in the 'minefield' at Naudibou