A week before I left on the hike, every one of my colleagues was taking the piss out of me.
“You know you can’t wear heels, right?"
"Don’t forget to take your mascara!"
Yes. Me. The person who owns precisely one pair of pants and one pair of flats (for emergencies) in a wardrobe full of dresses and heels now has to wear hiking boots, Kathmandu and Macpac branded gear and venture into the great unknown commonly referred to as The Bush.
Holy. Shit.
But for some inexplicable reason, I had gotten myself signed up to the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, which have to be completed before the age of 25. And as I approach the age of quarter-century crisis, it’s time to complete the most daunting task of the DOE Awards - the 4 day "adventurous journey” into the middle of fucking nowhere.
Our assignment: to complete a practice journey, followed by the actual qualifying journey.
Our destinations: Namadgi National Park just south of Canberra for the practice journey, and the Six Foot Track in the Blue Mountains for the qualifying.
So it’s off to the Namadgi Visitors Centre early Friday morning for the start of our ADVENTURE.
All bright and chirpy. Little did we know …
The morning started off promising enough. We began by hiking up Mount Tennent. The day was clear. The views were stunning. The terrain was friendly …
Until it wasn’t.
Half way up Mt Tennent, the terrain got steep. Our packs full of 4 days’ worth of clothes, food, water, sleeping bag and toiletries weighed like a baby elephant on our backs. Every step became a struggle. Every breath a desperate gasp. And every now and then, a day hiker would jog past casually, wearing the latest Gore-Tex gear, carrying nothing but a bottle of water and their hiking poles, and bid us all “g'day” like it was just a nice stroll in the woods. I wanted to smash them in the face with my baby elephant.
The hills are aliiiiiiive ….
About 2.5 hours later, with my breathing reaching panic attack levels of hysteria, I finally crawled like a tortoise to the Mount Tennent junction, where we had a lunch of vegetarian burritos (om nom nom), before descending a meandering track down the shoulder of Mount Tennent. Before long, we had reached a beautiful area of Namadgi known as the Bushfold Flats, which - as the name suggests - was flat, grassy, and wedged between mountains on either side.
The scenery was superb, and we felt like the only people in this special corner of the country.
But Bushfold Flats had lulled us into a false sense of security, especially when it came to a rather abrupt end, and we found ourselves walking through a rather dense gumtree forrest uphill. And uphill. And uphill. And uphill … it seemed like every time we turned and expected the landscape to plateau, we found another upward incline. I was struggling by then. No longer capable of walking like a respectable human being, I was stumbling through the bush like a zombie with a swag - flailing, panting, cursing at the sky for my own foolishness in agreeing to do this.
Suddenly, around yet another uphill bend, we heard footsteps. Out of the bush emerged a man I’m not entirely sure wasn’t a hallucination. He was shirtless and wearing what could only be called a skirt. He had a beer belly that hung as low as his knees, and when he spoke, he spoke in the unmistakable accent of a Kiwi.
“The car park? Oh you’re not far awrff,” he said, referring to the next landmark we were to look for on our hike, “maybe about fef-teen minutes?”
15 minutes my eye.
30 minutes later, the sun was setting, the temperatures were dropping, and we were still stumbling through the bush while carrying the weight of worldly misery on our backs.
“I’m sure it’s just around the corner, guys. Not far now!” said fellow hiker Lauren. I wanted to punch her in the face. Then punch everyone else in the face. Then punch myself in the face.
But failing to do any of that, I did the next most sensible thing: I put one foot in front of the other and took just one more step. And then another. And then another.
We never made it to our intended campsite for the night and ended up camping in a clearing near the Booroomba Rocks. On our first day, we hiked just over 13KMs through varied terrain. To top the day off, the canister of gas I was carrying was punctured and leaked. All of my clothes smelled like gas. Not baked beans gas. Poisonous suicidal gas. Which was probably a close reflection of my mood by that stage.
At 6:30PM, when darkness finally settled in for the night, we all crawled into our tents, too exhausted to watch the stars, or eat marshmallows, or make an attempt at ghost stories, or do any of the cheesy things cheesy people do at cheesy camps. Too exhausted in fact, to be bothered by the scuttling outside our tents all night from unknown creatures.
This was going to be the longest fucking night ever.
xx doots
No comments:
Post a Comment