about others

At some point I was asking:

– How many up hills are there, just tell me the truth, if there is another yet to come leave me here to die…

The leaders didn’t tell me the truth. Obviously. After a while I stopped asking:

– I don’t believe there is a Berowra station anymore. It’s a myth. I don’t care I can walk the whole night.

Really, there is a point of exhaustion you reach and go beyond. You can keep going until you die. My head felt light, my legs heavy but I could continue walking for an eternity. I didn’t care anymore if the trail was flat, going up or down, if there were puddles I would splash right in the middle of them, I could se we stumbled a bit here and there not being able to properly get the legs up to walk.

One of the girls joked with me:

– We have deceived you! We brought you here to kill you ! HA HA HA

– Ok, please do it soon and end the pain! I answered in a wail!

That friend that had been previously looking for the dead body had found another idea to chew on:

– What if we could get home and change to a new pair of legs. Rested ones. Some that would not be this painful.

She found an accomplice for the thought:

– Yeah! Then we could have different sets of legs with the proper muscles developed for each activity… like one pair for running…

– One for dancing!

We all joined in:

– One for walking.

– One for rollerblading.

– One to use mini-skirts with, perfect smooth skin over a nice long muscled leg…

We imagined a few more legs…

It is interesting how a walk like this makes you completely self-aware. You get a new conscience over your body. Things that you take for granted on your day-to-day world are vital then. Like food and drink. A little snack can be felt as a burst of energy so clearly it is not normal. On my normal days I have lunch when it is lunch time, a snack on my breaks, dinner when it is dinner time. In the adventure you don’t eat you control your energy supply. Same thing with water, I was never so aware of the hydration of my body, every time I got slightly dehydrated a mild headache started, it was the sign I was forgetting to drink. As soon as I got a bit of water in me, the headache was instantly gone.
We also tried a yucky thing called Goo, it looks bad but it tastes good. A small pouch with some goo that can only be extraterrestrial technology. An energy compost that gave us energy for a whole mountain climb with half a dose. Some sportist magic stuff, I only know it worked, although I also got a slight headache when it kicked in. The pain was gone in a few minutes and the energy helped a lot.
One of my friends felt that the Goo and one painkiller we each took were like cheating. The other explained: you will still have to walk, and climb, and get out of this bush, how could that be cheating?

My next delirious phase happened when I heard a highway somewhere… I could hear trucks passing:
– I’m gonna find the highway ( I can hear it) and take off my clothes (there is no way to get a ride looking this disgusting and a much higher chance being naked) and stick the thumb out and get a ride. I better make sure I negotiate the ride from outside the door, cause once the driver feels my smell … I’m not gonna accept a motorbike ride though, imagine being completely naked with a big helmet on your head… too strange.
By then I realised the peeing was another changing behaviour. At the beginning we were all clean prudes, looking for covering bushes to pee on, taking a tissue to dry ourselves and cleaning the hands with sanitary gel afterwards. After falling on a mud ugly stream, being exhausted, soaked wet, with knees that were ready to proclaim revolution on my body and proclaim total stop of all the machines, peeing was not an issue anymore. Anytime needed we just screamed to the others “peeing here” stepped to the side of the trail, undressed, bent, urinated, put the pants back on, all together with the underwear, in one go, and continued walking screaming this time: “done”. We would hold until uncomfortable so there was always someone else to pee with you, making each stop a very strange scene.

The highway was gone, with no sign of ever it getting closer to us… so my next running away thought happened when we got to Berowra waters. I’m not sure why I didn’t beg the few fishermen on the way to take me with them. I guess that again I was deluded thinking we were almost there.
I saw some boats in the bay and decided it was a perfect solution:
– I will swim to that little boat and sleep there. Tomorrow I’ll find a way out of this no-where!

This is the story of a 30km bush walking at the Great North Walk.
I had a chance to experience that last Sunday. When my friend said she was doing the Oxfam walk with the Informa team I thought it was awesome. A great idea! I even went to the walk’s website to see if there was any team looking for people to join them so I could go too. When I started reading the information I realised it was 100km bush walking. That was when I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to do this year; maybe next year… Anyway I told my friend I would go with her to some of the training sections on weekends.

We have been walking from Mosman to Wynyard some mornings before work to start training. When she asked me: “we are going for a 30k walk on a Sunday, wanna come?” I quickly agreed and we moved on to other topics of conversation. After all we were doing 8km in the morning without breaking a sweat, I thought it would be challenging but nice. Basically, I was completely deluded.
It was only Wednesday last week that I decided to ask a bit more about it.
– Where are we going to walk?
– Oh, it’s a bush walk north of Sydney.
– Ok.
– It’s the hardest part of the Oxfam and we want to know how long it’s going to take us to do it. She said.
– I’m sorry???
If I was a little bit smarter I would have given up then and there. But I didn’t, in my imagination it was a bush walk with a lot of bush and rivers, crates, stones, etc. But in my imagination the world had only two dimensions, I forgot about “mountains Gandalf”…
As soon as it started I realised that there was definitely a higher plane there and was puffing on the first climb, not knowing that was easy as easy goes. I find it hilarious to compare myself at the beginning and the end of the trail in several aspects…
The adventure started full on, we left the car at Berowra station, to catch the train to Hawkesbury River station. We were buying the first ticket when we saw the train coming. We quickly made a system, one of us pressing the buttons: destination, single trip; the other feeding coins to the machine: one, two, three – The Train is Coming! – Four – Quickly! – Five tickets and we started running to catch it – not looking at the face of the girl behind hating us for having to buy five tickets at the last minute. I hope she made it too.
At the train we were chatty and noisy, the ride back home, in the car was on the other hand full of tired silence.