Tag: Heysen Trail

After a better night’s sleep i was up early and off for a 15km walk to the Tapanappa campsite. Being shorter than yesterday I hoped I would have  a better day.  However, as is quite usual for me, I went the wrong way coming out of the campground. I went up the road, a steep climb, for about 2km before I checked my app and realised I missed the turnoff into the bush which was directly across the road from the campground. Bloody hell! Now a 19km day!

I would have kicked myself if I had had the energy. I was feeling the extra weight of my new tent, which is about 1kg heavier than my trusty Zpacks tent. I decided to hang it on my front to even out the weight better, which works well with the Aarn Packs that many kiwis use. I liked the result as I stood straighter and the pack weight didn’t seem as bad. Because of the heat and lack of fresh water on the trail, I was carrying about 3.5 litres of water (read 3.5kg). The day carried on up and down through the colourful Australian bush. Did I say up and down? Lots of birdsong and a few kangaroos to chat to.

I plodded on along tracks that are also firebreaks, meeting a man who was a day off finishing the complete Heysen trail after 55 days of walking. He looked tanned and fit and strong: quite the opposite to me. He told me that the detour, due to the fires, was “brutal” saying it was the hardest part of the whole trail for him. OMG, I thought, if he has walked 1,180km and today was the hardest, how the hell am I going to manage it? But what could I do, I had to keep going up and down. I had a good first lunch stop before the “Brutal” climb and sucked it up and carried on.

Rock climbing is not my forte and I didn’t have the strength to heave myself and my pack up the steep climb. So I took to throwing my tent up to the next ledge. I had to be very careful, so it didn’t roll all the way down as there was no way I wanted to have to go down that cliff to collect it. I would then heave myself up, grunting and groaning and repeated that all the way to the top. I came across of group of strapping young high school boys on a day walk and tried to con them into carrying my pack up for me but got no takers. Rude!

Once at the top, I felt very proud of myself if not completely shattered. I did it! The worst part over meant that the rest of the day wasn’t so bad. 8 hours all up with lots of stops.

Tapanappa Campsite was a drive in one and there were a few school groups and families in situ, but I was too tired to socialise. The lad from the night before had arrived not long before me and had struggled with the day as well. He was heading back the same way the next day and not looking forward to the climb down the cliff.

I bused from Adelaide to Cape Jervis to start my Heysen Damnlongwalk.

• Arrogant bus driver
• He stopped on the side of the road to let his drunk mate passenger off to have the longest pee I have ever seen
• then said he was running late and couldn’t stop to let me off at the campground
• I have to walk in the fading light along the highway 2.5 km back to the camp
• Tent up in the dark
• Couldn’t find the kitchen so ate my chilli beans cold straight from the can
• Hole in my mattress so bad sleep
• Not a good start I thought!

Next morning, in the daylight, I found the kitchen and patched the hole in my mattress and headed off to walk back into the start the trail. There was no chance of catching a hitch because of road works so I used the time to try and get my head back into the right space to be embarking on a damn long walk.

The Heysen Trail starts at the ferry terminal to Kangaroo Island which I had flown a few days ago. The island is a pristine nature reserve that is popular tourist attraction. One of the parks was established in 1919, “as a bit of a sanctuary for those suffering from ‘brain fag’”, according to the park’s founding father Samuel Dixon. Brain fag is a type of mental fatigue, in case you were wondering. I had flown over it and looked down at the coast line that I would be walking. It looked very flat.

The sign said 5 hours for the 14km to the Cobblers Hill Campsite but I had booked to stay another 2km up the track at the Eagle Waterhole walk-in site, making maybe a 6-hour day ahead of me.

The drive-in campgrounds are designed for the big Aussie vehicles that arrive, full of people with tents that pop up on top of their vehicles or large motorhomes and trailers. Tables, chairs, eskys full of beer and sausages, boom boxes and all the comforts of home are strategically erected around their sites as they settle in for a week’s holiday surrounded by flies and kangaroos. In contrast the walk-in sites are for people like me who can’t afford a big fancy car and chair so choose to carry their gear on their backs.

It took me 8 long, hard hours! I really am overweight, not fit or strong, but this walk is supposed to fix that. However, that didn’t stop me from imagining lots of ways that I could get out of going this. Like falling and breaking a leg (done that before), getting bitten by a snake of poisonous spider (quite possible in a country that has the world’s most venomous spiders and snakes), getting lost (probably hard to do as the trail is very well marked).

Then, at the 3km mark my racing heart issues began and I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t be able to control it. Anyway, I did my routine of sitting on the ground, blowing into an empty syringe until I was blue in the face then spinning around and sticking my legs up tree. Bugger , it worked! I probably look very silly doing this but there was only kangaroos out there to see me today.

So I carried on doing a lot of self-talk. “Harden up and handle it, don’t be a sook, just keep going one step at a time, you have handled a lot harder stuff than this. It is your own fault that you are not fit, you had Evan’s well-equipped gym to use for the last month, you have no excuses so just get on and walk! Look at the beautiful views, the wildflowers and the rocks and the sea, God help me, this is hard!”

It wasn’t flat. The trail goes along a cliff for a while, then steeply down to a cove, then steeply up again,  on repeat all day.

I finally arrived at the camp to find a young man who had passed me earlier in the day. I tried to look a bit less haggled than I actually was, but I don’t think I fooled him. I managed to put up my tent on wooden platforms, cleaned myself up and eat my pasta dinner before the sun went down. It had been a long hard day, but I was happy. I crawled into bed, exhausted. Hips really sore through the night so I didn’t get much sleep at all.