Something quite unusual has happened in the past year, and I’ve suddenly picked up on it after returning from the weekends’ hike.
As my life gets more and more crazy, my desire for simple pleasures gets greater and greater. The more I work 12 hour days, study till dawn, and take on freelancing modelling & design projects on the side, the more I want silence. Normal right? Sure. But where do I find it? 3 hours drive plus 9 hours/25 kilometres of hiking away!
I remember always camping as a kid. Mum and Dad would spend a few days packing up the 4WD, then we’d roll (in convoy with other families, or on our own) to the varying reaches of Western Australia; Augusta, Albany, Kalbarri, Pemberton, Denmark, Lancelin, Dongara, Binningup, Payne’s Find, Coral Bay, Exmouth, Monkey Mia, Geraldton, Shark Bay…. and all the little towns in between. The car would be full of portable CD players, cd’s, books, gameboys, lollies & chips, pushbikes, siblings, and sometimes the dogs. Every school holidays, we’d be off somewhere for a weekend, week, or two… and it was great! But as I got older, I wanted less tents and more caravans, then less caravans and more hotels, then less driving and more flying. Until eventually I phased the whole camping thing out. When I moved out of home, I spent most of my time with people who had never ‘camped’ – and who had no interest in it. And I’d never really appreciated the value in it anyway, even when it vanished as a pastime.
Just after I’d moved to Melbourne in 2007, a group of us decided it would be cool to drive to Lakes Entrance to camp. NONE of us had any camping equipment whatsoever, we borrowed it all, and most of our food was actually er, alcohol. I was handed a tiny tent, and was the first to set it up… I was so proud! I even took a photo with my phone and sent it to my mum haha.
I remember how broke I was then, but we still had so much fun…. disrupting the town and the campsites. That was my little reminder to me… I didn’t need trashy nightclubs, 3am taxi’s and 4am kebabs to feel alive and to disconnect myself from the chaotic world.
A few months into dating Jim, he invited me down the Wilsons Prom for a weekend away. We loaded up the old Cortina with Jims archaic and well used collection of hand me down camping gear, along with a canoe, and drove the three and a half hours to the southernmost point of the Australian mainland. It was winter, it was freezing, and it rained. And I had possibly the best weekend ever. Jimmy said that I passed the ultimate test… I knew how to pitch a tent. We brought the very best wine with us, and sat under the verandah in the rain, drinking by candle light and telling stories, before curling up under a pile of doonas and having an amazing early sleep, waking to a dawn of kookaburras, wombats shuffling by, and visiting rosellas. Then we took the canoe out onto the inlet, laid back and listened to nothing but the waves lapping against the hull. There was never anything so quiet. And I think I got hooked again. Thankfully these days we take the X-trail down… it’s a lot more comfortable for over 3 hours of driving.
Our next trip down was with massive packs. Jim had talked me into my first hike… a 12 kilometre overnight hike to Oberon Bay. I made a video of my struggle – its on my Facebook. It was very funny, and very hard work. But there was a strange sense of achievement, that I had walked that far, over, up and down granite hill faces, spent the night listening to the waves on the shore, and then hiked back in the morning. It was a physical barrier I had never pushed before. Sure, I work out, I ride my bike sometimes, and I go to the gym… but when you’re hiking you don’t have any choice, you cant just stop and go home. You cant take a shower, or crash on the couch… You just have.to.keep.going. I pushed through until it didn’t hurt anymore. Oh don’t get me wrong though… two days later I could barely walk, but I knew that I had achieved something pretty awesome.
We’ve been camping a few more times since then, and Ive started asking for it more and more. Jimmy still laughs when I get down there, the campsite is set up, the food is cooking, the wine is open… and Im standing in front of him asking what we should do next. ‘How about nothing?’. But I can’t do NOTHING!? Are you crazy!? I have to do something!!! It always takes me a little while to realise that there is nothing that needs doing… it’s supposed to be that way. Our list of achievements for the day might read; kick the football on the beach, and walk up to the lookout.
Now back to my 25km saga. Jimmy had begged to go hiking again and I’d agreed. He didn’t tell me that the trip was 25 kilometres, fortunately for him, I didn’t find out the distance until we’d returned. And so we set off from Melbourne at 9.30am, arriving in Tidal River (Wilsons Prom) by 12.30pm. We could see it had been raining, and the sky was a heavy grey, but the air was fairly warm. We started off at 1, glad to know that wearing shorts and singlets paid off, as we watched other hikers peeling off jackets and beanies from the heat of the hike. 4 hours later we arrived at Little Waterloo Bay, a secluded grove of trees and sheltered campsites, wedged between a steep rock face, and the beach. Thankfully, all the hiking destinations have toilets! We found a well-drained, gently sloping spot under some trees, set up tent and cooked our dinner… ravioli, pasta sauce, tuna, chickpeas, and vegies.. oh it tasted so good with our bottle of red! Then it started to rain so we piked early. And it rained and rained and rained…. and rained… nonstop till dawn. We awoke dry and free from mosquito bites (yay for the new hiking tent!) but very very sore. We’d forgotten the inflatable mattress, only packing the high density foam. Ohhh the pain. And the rain wouldn’t stop… it drizzled… incessantly. Our dry clothes were soon wet as we packed up all our gear, but our situation was infinitely better than the foolish people who had opted for the flat piece of ground which you, by taking one look at it, could tell regularly flooded. We walked past their tents and they were almost 10-15cms underwater! The poor bastards were standing around like drowned cats, looking very very upset. Packing up, we began the hike back and I somehow found the strength to push through the pain and climb all those damn hills! It drizzled non stop and we were soaked through, rain dripped off my hat, and my shoes squelched from the water and mud inside them. My back muscles burned and I had shin splints but we kept on going, the sand in my shoes rubbed against my wet socks and blisters formed on my heels. But I was determined to make it back in better time than it had taken us to get there. We got back to the overnight carpark by 3.30pm, and we were back in Melbourne by 6.30pm. Thanks to the car heating, we had thawed, and both of us had taken turns having a nap. We’d stripped off the wet clothes and jumped into our spares… next time we might take lightweight raincoats though hehe, and remember our inflatable mats. And we’re going to buy hiking boots, instead of sneakers whose delightful ‘ventilation’ panels let in a lot of water!
Aside from the landscape being incredibly beautiful ESPECIALLY during the low light and the drizzling rain, there was something completely uplifting about the whole experience. We hiked for maybe half an hour at a time without saying a word, all you could hear was the soil crunching, birds, and the ocean far away. And once you can push beyond the pain, your mind drifts elsewhere… sometimes I thought about work, and school, and relationships and money… you have a lot of thinking time out there! But other times it was blank. Blank, but not lost… just calm. And I’d study the water dripping off the eucalyptus leaves, or the bullants charging up to the giant humans with all the bravado of ancient Knights of King Arthur. There were birds and lizards and wombats… and kilometres of views to swoon over, but most importantly there was nothing but us and the knowledge that we were completely isolated from a world of ‘perceived’ troubles. It all kind of washed away with the rain. And if it wasn’t raining, it would have dried away in the sun. And if there was no sun, it would have burned away through our perseverance. We had no choice but to push on, and that drew all our focus into a gorgeous little vortex where nothing really mattered… at all.
Jimmy turned to me at the end of the hike and could see the pain on my face. He asked me, “Would you do that again?” I said,
“Definitely”.
Now we’re planning our next one…. three days and 36 kilometres. I’ll need some rest first! But I can’t wait. It’s a pretty healthy thing to get addicted to I think…
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