Tag Archives: nature

Come Hiking: $27

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5 days

4 nights

Approx 100km

Cooloola Great Walk

Image: Cooloola Great Walk (from Queensland.com website)

Leaving from Rainbow Beach end

Date TBA, but from 12th April onwards

Cost is $6.75/night/person ($27 on QPWS booking site), plus any associated transfer costs

You won’t need a lot of experience, but you will definitely need to be fit and committed to completing the entire 100km. I’m not carrying anyone out!

Image: I’m not doing this! (Credit for image: click here)

This is a remote hike that requires self sufficiency and you will need to carry all of your own gear in a pack on your back. This will weigh somehwere in the vicinity of 10 – 20kg. You will be responsible for your own water, your own food and its preparation.

I am more than willing to help anyone who needs a hand with stuff, including advice and any recommendations, I just wanted to make it clear than while I am an experienced hiker with eco tourism qualifications, this is NOT a glamping experience and you will be responsible for your own health, safety and any other requirements.

There are a few companies that charge people for this hike. This company lists it as $1095 per person and all you get is your food and the camping permits. That means that the experience and the food is worth a whopping $1068!! Gees, the food would want to be bloody top shelf for that price. Not sure my indian sachets would cut it:

Image: I love these things! They are so freakin’ yummy. You can get them from supermarkets, but the best ones come from Indian shops (Gits Ready Meals). They are all around $2.50 – $4.00 each.

I have a few hiking items I can lend people, but this is a list of basic requirements:

  • Hiking pack (this needs to have some kind of frame. If you can bend your pack , it has no frame and isn’t any good for hiking long distances).
  • Tent
  • Sleeping pad
  • Sleeping bag
  • Mess kit (you know, stuff you use to eat. Include a stove here if you want to take one)
  • Snake bite kit (At least one good compression bandage)
  • Personal light
  • Toiletries
  • Water and water bottles (inlcude water filtration if you want to filter water. I don’t normally bother if it’s tank water)
  • Food
  • Clothing
  • Good shoes/boots

Image: Hiking gear. Trangia stove in foreground. Helinox chair and poles, Wilderness Equipment tent.You don’t need expensive gear like this. I only have it because sponsors gave it to me.

A cheap dome tent (not a pop-up one though) from KMart will work fine, or if you want a cheap entry-level hiking tent, check out Snowys. Wild Earth is another awesome outdoor store in Qld. There’s also heaps of good second hand stuff for sale on Gumtree and ebay.

Some stuff you can share, like water filtration, stoves and tents, so not every person needs their own personal item if you are willing to share these things. Sharing stuff also means you can carry half each to reduce each person’s load.

This kind of thing takes a fair bit of dicking around to organise logistically because you have to work out where to leave your car, how to get to the trailhead from where you did leave it, and then at the end, ummm, how do I get home?? So, what I’m saying here is that if you are interested in coming along, we’d have to sort these details out. I can fit (read: squash) 4 other people in my car.

Image: This is a tidied up version of what dicking around looks like. Of course, this doesn’t capture the ten hours I’ve invested in the whole thing or phone calls and emails I’ve made and sent to ask questions about car storage, transportation, etc, etc. It’s easy to see why a lot of people just pay the thousand bucks for a tour company to do this for them. It would save a lot of hair-pulling.

Contact me on this website or send me and email to let me know if you’re interested:

talulasweetie@gmail.com

Image: Me on the last long distance hike I did (450km).

Fatty and Skinny in Woodgate

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Sometimes people tell me I’m skinny. I don’t think I am, I’m just really fit, so I have a fair bit of muscle and not much body fat. This doesn’t happen by accident because I train pretty hard, which is why I don’t really like getting told that I’m skinny. I just think that people aren’t generally used to seeing women who are my age and look like I do.

When I was a kid, I was teased for being fat. I don’t even know if I was. I do know that I was taller than everyone else in my classes all the way through primary school. It wasn’t until around grade nine or ten did the boys start to overtake me in height, and even then, there were only about four of them. Mr Fell, who was a teacher at my primary school in Hervey Bay whispered in my ear one day, “Jenny needs to go to Jenny Craig” What kind of an arsehole says something like that to a kid?! Ugh.

Me and Fatty have started hanging out a fair bit lately. This is Fatty in his natural habitat. Taken on the latest secret track I discovered in Woodgate:

I found a secret track on Google Earth a while back, so yesterday I set out with a hand drawn map (I don’t have an internet phone) to see if I could follow it:

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I rode for two hours, mostly through deep sand along the secret track and back home again. It would’ve been around 30km. It was a really hard ride, but still, it was awesome, and this time I didn’t fall off, although I came close a couple of times. See, the bike needs to go forward when I’m on it, which is the whole concept behind cycling, and if I don’t have enough momentum when I hit a deep patch of sand, then over I go. It all happens in slow motion and is quite painless due to the soft landing. Getting the sand out of my shoes, and last time out of my hair and ear, is another story, especially when I’m all sweaty.

I fell off once due to a spider’s web. I’m really scared of spiders and I rode down yet another secret track and went face-first into a spider web. All I could think of was having a giant spindly-legged beast on my face or on my helmet and I screamed (even though I’m a girl, I rarely do this and my screams sound nothing like you’d imagine a girly scream to sound)  and jumped off the bike mid pedal, it stopped going forward and promptly fell on my leg. Fatty is heavier than a regular mountain bike (due to his obese wheels I’d say). This was about three weeks ago and I still have the bruise. There was no spider. This is how big a spider is:

 

 

But this is how big it feels to me, even if its non existent:

I looped around back to a track I’ve ridden down multiple times and Fatty said he wanted a rest, so he posed for a photo here:

I love Fatty, but it wasn’t always like that. And the thing is, he doesn’t even belong to me. He belongs to the cool guy I’m married to. When the cool guy bought this bike I told him he was being ridiculous. “It’s a stupid fad these fat bikes. We’ve already got bikes, why do you need one like this? It’s ridiculous, look how big the wheels are!” It’s pretty funny now that I’m the one who rides Fatty all the time and am always going on and on about how great it is to have a bike that can do the things that Fatty can do. There’s no way in hell I’d ever be able to ride a regular mountain bike in the places I take Fatty, and there’s no way I’d ever be able to make a regular mountain bike go as fast as I can get Fatty to go. On Fatty I feel like I’m invincible. I didn’t like Fatty in the beginning and sometimes it’s good to be wrong about things. Mr Fell was wrong about me too, when he believed I was worthless, and I was wrong about myself for a long time believing that I was fat, ugly and nonathletic.

Be wrong and see where it can take you