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The day started with a strange wailing, hooting call drifting down off the mountain. It was still dark. Twice. Each call elicited a murmur of comment from the porters before they dropped into silence. I waited for more and wondered who or what was out so early or so late. I dropped off again and woke to someone’s alarm chiming at 0500. We are off early to Brigade Hill.
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I wake early and gaze into the dark. The sky is backlit by a dying moon so its hard to determine the time. No one is moving so I drift back to sleep. Eventually the sound of a morning start filters through. Tent flies are unzipped with a riiiiiiiiiip. Bodies roll over in their sleeping bags. A staggered chorus of farts – all that lunchtime spam and beans create consequences. A snore still erupts every now and then. A pot clatters and there is a low murmur of conversation from the hut next door where the porters are camped. Then some laughter, more zips rip and the chat among our own group picks up. Read more
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The moon rose last night over the village just as we were thinking of heading to bed. Its brightness startled us and we stood in the silence and stared at the spectacle of massive hardwoods silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Well, at least until we were distracted in turn by the fireflies which skidded through the darkness and impressed us with their luminescence. We stood in silence yet again and caught the wonder of the display. Read more
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A fitful nights sleep after our first day on the track. Dinner last night was a saveloy (plastic sausage) and a serving of Deb (powdered potato) with some tomato sauce. It hit the spot and the porters were delighted to be done with the weight of the meat. The full moon lifted through the cloud and lined all the jungle foliage with a silver edge. It was a pretty special sight. The night was a soft round of noise (a bubbling stream in the background, roosters crowing at the moon), and weird dreams that seemed more real than reality. Pete thought he was sticking his head out of the tent talking to someone only to realise he had not unzipped the tent – his dreams were weird and lucid too, and he had not partaken the betel!
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After messing around at Port Moresby we got on the road out to Bomana Cemetery where we were reminded in a most sombre way what this is really about. 3,700 headstones gleamed white in the sun marking what Kokoda represents. This is not just any old track after all. We held a brief memorial service, reading some poems and the Ode, then remembering these fallen soldiers with a minutes silence. I am encouraged by that. This will not be just another bush walk but a memorial and tribute as well.
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The day started with the occasional whooshing car alerting me to the pending dawn. Tradies getting to site early and telling me to wake up long before the alarms chimed at 0530. But if it wasn’t the tradies waking me up it would have been the dodgy mattress on the church hall floor where we had camped anticipating the early start and a lift to the airport by Liz and Leanne which is where we are now, watching the fog wipe out a crystal clear morning and make us wonder at our real departure time. After some raisin toast and coffee the fog seems to have lifted and so too our worries about getting started. Read more
Seven days ago more than 4 inches of rain fell on the suburb between 1030 in the morning and dinner time. Today the creeks are back to normal but the thrumming of insects in the canopy is a hard, driving buzz and the reptiles are out and about in a warm, damp and sometimes sodden bushscape. We were alert for snakes but fortunately saw none – but five or six water dragons of various sizes. It’s been three weeks since we have been out. Some of us have to confess to creaking joints – out of form already. But 11km on a hot sunny day in four hours was a reasonable effort on what is graded a “hard” track. And we took the time to “smell the roses”.
The Great North Walk is great because it starts in Sydney and not because it links you to Newcastle 200km away. Sorry Novacastrians, cheap shot. We knocked off 10km of it today – from Thornleigh to Lane Cove. Here are all the usual sights and sounds of walking through the Sydney bush, though on this leg the M2 motorway is not too far away so we caught the sound of the occasional Harley running away from the speed cameras. Always alert to something different (apart from adders or red bellied blacks) we were struck today by the high quality graffiti under the Bridge. This is not exactly in the middle of suburbia but I guess someone just could not resist those grey concrete slab canvasses crying out for some work.
Somehow summer snuck into spring and thirty degrees or more baked Sydney today. But for the best part of the afternoon we hardly noticed as we plugged along the Governor Phillip track through cool thermals of fern moist air, to the background tune of water spilling over rocks and sucking along fallen logs. Though all that was thundered out at one point as a chopper hauled in on us to pick up water. It repeated the exercise a few times and once we had made higher ground we could see smoke threatening houses on a far ridge. A 15km walk – our initial warm up for a crack at Kokoda in twelve months time!
Occasionally we have attempted to be a tourist in our own town but we usually stagger to a hotel, collapse, have a late breakfast on the sidewalk and then head home feeling somewhat cheated and resolved to be more “touristy”next time. This morning I walked with some friends along 10km of track only minutes from home. It’s perhaps the best result of checking out my own town in a long time. Read more
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