Emuzing

Europe

2008-09-01T06:32:00.001-07:00

I have omitted to convey I fairly major detail...

I am about to go to Europe for 8 weeks. I am leaving on 21 September and will not be back home until 16 November. Although, this is not important in itself, it means that although the walk is just under 12 weeks away, I effectively only have 3 weeks left to plan and organise the walk.

The timing of the trip to Europe was a bit out of our control in that I want to go visit my sister who is living in France at the moment and will not be there anymore next year. Also, there were considerations about work which made it a suitable time to go to Europe.

Some may think that it is a bit stupid to be out of the country before such a major walk as the AAWT but there is some method to the madness. I have decided to use the trip as part of the preparation for the walk itself. In particular, I plan to do lots and lots of walking. I will also be taking my backpack and will be carrying all my gear on may back. This should give me some reasonable training for preparation for the walk. The major weakness is that I may not be walking up hills but I will have to find some somewhere.

In any case, I am effectively in the last three weeks of planning and preparing for the walk and as such I have lots of work to do!

Gear

2008-09-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

What gear should I take?

Oh, if only it were simple. I have agonised over what gear to take and what to leave behind for years.

I have surfed the net and read everyones opinion on what to take and what not to. I have read the whole "ultralight" walking debate and looked at the other end of the spectrum which says that you should not go into the bush without "this and that".

Everyone makes it sound so simple but it just does not seem simple to me. On the one hand I desperately want to keep the weight down because it is the weight more than anything that makes the walk difficult. If we did not have to carry anything I am sure the walk we be almost easy. On the otherhand, there are many things that I feel that a necessary to take even if it means carrying the extra weight.

I am still formulating exactly what I will take but I am getting pretty close to a final manifest. I have decided, for better or worse, to be on the "heavier but safer/comfortable" end of the spectrum to the "lighter but rougher" end of the specturm. My plan is to take a maximum 25kg back pack.

I have seen some people say they took a 16kg backpack. To be honest, I just don't know how they do it. I look at my manifest and can not see that there is much weight left to trim. By the time you have taken a 3kg tent, 4kg backpack, 1.5km sleeping bag, 3kg clothing and approximately 7kg of food, plus a couple more kilos for other miscellaneous items (maps, gps, epirb, cooking) there is not much left to leave out. It is amazing how it adds up so quickly.

I know some would say that you do not need some of this stuff (you do not need a full tent - just a fly) or you can cut down considerably (e.g buy lighter backpacks or strip them down), but I do not think it is all that realistic. I personally do not feel all the comfortable with the idea of being in a snow/rainstorm for a couple of days under just a fly. Similarly, I can by lighter gear eg. backpack but they are too small and too flimsy to rely upon for 6 weeks of serious walking).

I admit that I am taking a couple of little things that some people consider luxuries (e.g a small travel pillow) but I know that I am taking these things for other good reasons (e.g to get a good nights sleep).

If there is just one consolation to the heavy weight that I will be taking is that 7kg of the total weight is food and that as such it should get lighter every day until by the last day the pack is 16kg.

It does not matter what you do with gear - damned if you do and damned if you don't!

It will be interesting to see what my thinking is after the walk!

Training

2008-09-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

We have already started training for the AAWT.

I am a great believer in training in the same way as what you intended to do. For the AAWT, this means walking with a heavy backback up and down steep hills in the bush. In particular, the emphasis is on the hills bit.

My objective is not to become super fit. I don't think it is realistic to be as fit at the beginning of the walk as I would be at the end of the walk. The only way to be that fit is to take on a training resume equivalent to the walk itself and given time and other constraints it just not practical to do that.

Instead, I expect to build fitness during the walk itself. My main focus is on "softening" the blow. I hope to take the first week fairly slowly and try to easy myself into it - even though the first week is probably the hardest section of the walk. As such, I want to provide myself with a level of fitness that will take the shock out of the first few days of walking. I don't want to go from a low level of fitness into the walk and "pay dearly" in the first week. I just want to have a level of fitness which will allow me to progress to a higher level of activity without feeling that I am going to die.

So my main focus is to find hills and climb them to build up general strength and to use those muscles that are needed to climb hills so that those muscles do not scream at me during the first week.

I have read somewhere that on average you climb 600 vertical metres up and 600 vertical metres down on average when doing the AAWT. It does not sound a lot but it is a long way up and down with a heavy back pack combined with the additional 20kms per day that you have to do.

I look out my lounge room window and look at Mt Tennant. I believe it is just over 1300 metres high and the base near the visitor centre is about 640 metres. This means that Mt Tennant is nearly 700m vertically. I look at it and think that I have to climb that day after day for six weeks.

So the main part of training is to climb the hill behind my home - Tuggeranong Hill. The hill is a 850m above sea level and my house is about 640m above sea level. This means it is roughly 200m vertically from top to bottom. Sometimes it is straight up, sometimes it is up via the fire track and other times I take the scenic route and go up and down all over the place. Normally, it takes an hour or two to complete - depending on the route that I take. It gives a pretty good work out even if it only about 1/3 of the daily planned quota. All in all it is pretty tough going - especially some bits - but not too bad. However, I sometimes think what it would be like to do three times a day instead of just once.

I try to climb it once or twice a week with a backpack with weight in it. A total of 25 kilos. In the past I threw in a 20 kg bag of paving sand but recently I have been trying to fill the bag with my real gear. For some strange reason it seemed much hard with my real gear than with the bag of sand. I am not sure why but I think that it was because I now have a different centre of gravity. I found it very difficult in some patches with the weight on my back. I felt like a drunk falling all over the place. Some obstacles like rooks and logs on the steep slope were major challenges and took several attempts sometimes.

Otherwise I try to supplement my training with other excercise - walking around the lake (with a backpack), riding the bike to work and back (40kms return) and the odd game of squash. I certainly feel much better and stronger for all the training but I notice that it takes me a few days to recover from some of it - especailly the hill climbs. I am stiff and sore in the legs. It makes me wonder what it will be like when I don't have any recovery time!

Practice Walk

2008-09-01T04:57:00.000-07:00

We had our first trial walk a few weekends ago.

We went for a "quick" walk up Mt Tennant and stayed at bushfold flats overnight. It was great to get out and try some of the stuff I had been planning.

The walk was only a few kilometres in an a few kilometres out (about 8km one way) put it gave us a chance to discover a few things about ourselves and our gear.

The first thing you discover was that bushwalking can be hard work. Although, it was not amazingly difficult, we stil had to climb two thirds of Mt Tennant with a fairly heavy backpack. The track up Mt Tennant is very good but very steep in places. It was on the steep sections that it starts to hit you the challenge - physical and mental - of doing the AAWT. You suddenly realise that you are gasping for breath on the steep sections and that it is difficult but you then realise that this just one small section of just one day of a much longer journey. You start to wonder what it is like going having to do this day after day after day in conditions much more difficult (heat, food, sleep, flies, boredom, etc) and you start to wonder whether you are really up to it. Well in any case, it was to have a bit of a reality check to put it all in perspective.

But enough of the bad stuff - on the whole the walk was great. Bushfold Flats was just fantastic. It was a beautiful spot. Although I have been through there once before, I never appreciated how beautiful the place was. Duncan especially could not believe that it was possible to go just a few kilometres out of town and have the opportuninity to walk and camp in such a great place. You tend to think that you have to drive for hours and hours to get somewhere so peaceful. If only a small proportion of the AAPT is like that it will be worth some of the bad things.

We found a great little campsite on some flatish ground with a wonderful view of the hills around. We set up, made a nice little meal, and then made a lovely campfire. We sat there and looked at the stars and talked about the walk and watched the planes flying low overhead as they came to land in Canberra. Duncan slept outside under the stars and I slept in the tent. It was lovely.

The best bit however was the snow. It was bitterly cold overnight (minus 8 degrees we think) and the morning started with a good dusting of snow. We had a leisurely breakfast as the snow came down and we watched it all slowly turn white it was great.

We are planning another more substantial walk this weekend to further test our gear and preparation for the main event.

Test Run

2008-08-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

Today we do our first test run.

We have decided to do a quick short overnight walk to test our equipment out and to get into the swing.

So we have decided to go do the AAPT tonight - well not exactly. We are going to do one small part of it - the very end. We are going to climb Mount Tennant and camp somewhere nearby. We are leaving late this afternoon, do a couple of hours walking camp overnight and then do a couple of hours walking tomorrow morning. We should be back by lunch time tomorrow.

Why

2008-08-08T06:17:00.000-07:00

Why I am doing it? Because I have always dreamt of doing it!!!

Well that is not strictly correct. I have dreamt of walking from Kosciusko to Canberra (home) since I was a teenager. Don't really know why. I just always wonder what it would be like and it seemed like a reasonable challenge that I could complete. I have now in fact already achieved this goal (but in the opposite direction) over the last decade.

However, when I first heard about the Australian Alps Walking Track back in the early/mid 1990s (when there was talk of formally creating it), I thought that it sounded just the thing for me - the next major step.

I quickly came in to contact with the John Siseman book Alpine Walking Track (as it was called then) and read it many times over the years, dreaming of doing it. I have on many occassions thought that "this year" will be the year that I do it. However, other things have always got in the way and every year I have let it go to the next year.

However, the time has now come that I have made the commitment to do it. The main factors for deciding now to do it are:

Age - I am getting old - 40 years old and having a "mid life crisis" - and I know that every year I leave it it just gets that bit harder. I know many older people have completed it - some in their sixties - but I don't want to wait that long and I don't want my body falling apart while I am doing it.
Work - oh have I mentioned the fact that I hate work. I have grown so completely sick of my job that I desperately need not to be there for my own sanity. Don't get me wrong - I don't need a holiday - I just need to not be at work. But if I am not going to be at work, I might as well be doing something else and the timing seemed right.
Company - I have always assumed I would do the walk by myself (as a lot seem to because they can't find anybody else to go with them because of time, money, inclination etc). However, my brother Duncan is availble then - because he will be finishing university in mid November and will not start his new job until February and he needs something "to do". The fact that he is available will make it both easier and more enjoyable for me.

So that's why....

Us

2008-08-08T05:44:00.000-07:00

Just a little background about "us"....

Firstly me - my name is Rohan Thomas. I am 40 years of age and live in the southern suburbs of Canberra. I am "married" (read de facto) to Francesca. I have no children of my own but have three "step" children. I work in IT as a software developer for a government agency.

I am no adventurer. I have done several bushwalks over the years but I am by no means a regular walker. Most walks I have dones have been short (1 or 2 nights). The longest I have done has been has 5 nights. The last walk a did was a couple of years ago....

The majority of the walks I have done have been in the Kosciusko, Namadgi and Budawang Ranges. I have walked also in the Bogong High Plains of Victoria.

I have already completed 1/3 of the Australian Alps walking Track - from Canberra to Thredbo. I did this in various stages several years ago.

Next my brother - Duncan. He will be 39 years by the time we start the walk. He currently lives in many places - Sydney, Wollongong, Bowral and Canberra. He is a student who is soon to finish his Accounting degree and start work in the Australian Public Service as a graduate in early 2009. He is single (read divorced) with no children.

He is the adventurer. He has done more adventures than I can recall. Here are some of his major achievements.

Walked extensively through Tasmania
Ridden on a push bike accross Australia from Perth to Sydney
Mountain climbed/bushwalked most of New Zealand including Mt Cook.
Walked/climbed most of the major peaks of the Andes in South America.
Trekked through Nepal extensively.
Walked most of the major national parks of western United States.
Worked as tour guide in Antartica (serveral times)
Plus some other things that I have forgotten about.

He has also done a few walks in the Australian Alps. The most notable was when he walked with me from Kiandra to Thredbo over six days and five nights several years ago.

And he is taller, stronger and fitter than I am!!!!

Plan

2008-08-08T05:22:00.000-07:00

The broad plan for the walk is as follows...

Depart Canberra Sunday 23 November 2008

Fly Canberra to Melbourne

Train Airport to Spencer Street Station Melbourne

Train from Melbourne to Moe.

Taxi from Moe to Walhalla. Spend the night at Walhalla.

Monday 24 November 2008, commence the walk.

The plan is to do the walk in six lots of one week stages.

Section 1 – Walhalla to Mt Skene 0km - 124km (Total 124km)
Section 2 – Mt Skene to Mt Hotham 124km – 248km (Total 124km)
Section 3 – Mt Hotham to Morass Creek 248km – 362km (Total 114km)
Section 4 – Morass Creek to Dead Horse Gap 362km – 519km (Total 157km)
Section 5 – Dead horse Gap to Kiandra 519km – 649km (Total 130km)
Section 6 – Kiandra to Canberra 649km – 790km (Total 141km)

As I live in the far southern suburbs of Canberra, the plan is not to finish at the "official" end of the track Namadgi National Park Visitor Centre but to continue walking to home. My home is about an extra 10kms from the Visitor Centre so all up the total should be just under 800km.

The expectation is that the walk will be take in 42 days meaning that we should finish some time around 5 January 2009.

I have also done a rough calculation of the number of steps it will take. 800km at approximately 80cm a step......that makes approximately 1.000.000 steps!!!!

Australian Alps Walking Track

2008-08-05T00:44:00.000-07:00

I am going to walk the Australian Alps Walking Track.

There I said it to the world....and whatsmore I am really going to do it!!!

I have decided to commit to this adventure. It is something that I have always thought of doing since I was young and have never gotten around to doing and I have figured that the time is now right to finally doing it.

This blog is (in part) my attempt to document the adventure from "wo to go". I want to record it for my own benefit and for the benefit of anybody else who is interested - either as I progress to the goal or afterwoods as retrospective.

I plan to do the walk at the end of 2008 - specifically 24 November. I am planning on doing it with my brother - Duncan - who is an experienced adventurer (more on that latter) and the plan is to do it in approximately 42 days (ie. six weeks).

I have already started the planning for this event and I shall detail more of it in the next posts.

But for now, I am happy that I have committed and declared my commitment to the world.

Ciao,