by Chris Bray
We raided the local supermarket, totally clearing out their pasta and burrito-bread shelves, and put together our two airdrops of supplies. These would be flung unceremoniously out of an aircraft to hit a rocky beach at just over 100 kilometres per hour—unless they overshot the mark, in which case they would be stuck high out of reach in a tree, or worse, landing before the beach, out in the ocean. Needless to say, we went to some lengths to pack them carefully. Delicate supplies like bags of milk power were surrounded by a shield of pasta, which in turn hid behind a protective layer of muesli bars. We then waterproofed each bundle, smothered them in a layer of empty egg cartons to act as crumple zones, and wedged them into four separate 20-litre cardboard wine casks. All done, we sent them on ahead to Tassie by courier.
After three months of planning we found ourselves sitting in the car on the way to the airport, while we frantically stitched ‘Australian Geographic’ patches proudly onto our matching Karrimor pants. A boy behind us in the luggage check-in queue whispered just loud enough for us to hear: ‘Wow, Mum, look—they’re from Australian Geographic!’ As our plane headed south to Tasmania we still couldn’t quite believe all this was happening—we were embarking on a real expedition as professionally sponsored adventurers!
The first oversight in our planning was disregarding the fact that Strahan—where we’d booked a seaplane to fly us into the wilderness at 5 pm that very afternoon—was in fact quite a long way from Tasmania’s Launceston airport, where we now stood. Armed with the knowledge that we couldn’t afford the once-per-day bus—which had just left anyway—the plan had always been to hitchhike to Strahan. We stood beside the road and took turns, one holding out an Australian Geographic banner to catch the attention of passing motorists, while the other held out his thumb for a ride. It worked like a charm, and we scarcely had to wait between lifts. Nevertheless, the afternoon ticked on.
With about one hour before our seaplane was due to leave, we found ourselves crammed in the back of an old VW Kombi as the driver and passengers—some incredibly boisterous German backpackers hell-bent on getting us to Strahan on time—coaxed the old vehicle to attain speeds and noises I’m sure it was never designed to achieve. Between backfires, we hurtled ever onwards. ‘Zis is ze town we were zinking of staying at tonight …’ one backpacker commented. ‘But … no … it looks iz no good …’ the driver lied, barely glancing down the turn-off as we rocketed past.
Five o’clock came and went, and we were still more than an hour away. We had missed our flight. Once this fact had sunk in, the Germans apologetically deposited us on the roadside at Zeehan—the last major town before Strahan—turned around and drove off, presumably all the way back to their intended stopover.
Thankfully, the pilot was unconcerned when I finally got through to him via satellite phone. ‘Don’t worry about it, I’d prefer to fly you in the morning anyway.’ Relief washed over me and, after enlisting the help of several more motorists, we arrived in Strahan late that night. The camping ground was chock-full, so we opted to set up camp in a park across the road, using a street sign to tie our tent to. Morning light revealed this street sign was in fact a large ‘No Camping’ sign. Hurriedly we packed up and sat in front of the Wilderness Air shed, trying to bring our laughter under control and regain serious explorer composure before our pilot appeared.
An hour later we were high in the air, following the coastline south to Port Davey—the same coastline that we’d hike back to Strahan. I suddenly noticed the pilot was intently studying a map which he’d draped over the steering wheel rather than watching where he was flying. Noticing my concerned glances, he leant over and, above the deafening roar of the engine, shouted into my ear, ‘I’m not quite sure where I’m going. I’ve never flown into this remote area before. I do scenic joy-flights around Strahan.’ I tightened my seatbelt still further.
About half an hour later, I gesticulated to a lake below and the pilot orchestrated a rather abrupt landing at our designated starting point near Port Davey. After the plane drifted into the shallows, we waded ashore with our packs and then stood watching the plane take off again and grow ever smaller in the sky until it was lost to sight.
This was it. That plane would now cover—in the space of about 40 minutes—the same journey that would ultimately take us 28 days of pure exertion. We posed for the traditional ‘start of expedition’ photo and then turned our attention to finding a way through the dense barrier of scrub that surrounded this lake, separating it from local grasslands we’d seen from the plane.
Confidently we strode right into the wall of scrub, only to find that it was alarmingly impenetrable just there. We withdrew, confidence still intact, and tried again 50 metres further along the lake’s shore. It was particularly nasty just there also, if not even worse. Still ignoring the disheartening burden of reality, we tried a third location, to the same effect. ‘Oh, I see … it’s like that, is it?’ Clearly, we’d just have to bite the bullet and fight our way through.
Out came the machete, and in we went. Prising apart the gnarled, tight branches in our faces, we’d hack, pull, bend or snap them down, firstly to waist height. From there we could get our knees into it and force the tangled mass down to a height we could climb onto, and trample down. Advancing this way 30 centimetres at a time, we gradually mined our tunnel into this wall of scrub and eventually struggled through to the ‘grassland’. All I can say is that the ‘grass’ looked a lot shorter from the plane. It was, at times, above head height—well, above my head height, anyway, as Jasper enjoyed pointing out. Creeks were invisible until we unceremoniously fell through into them. Ground snakes slithered at eye-level. Come nightfall, it took a good hour to slash and trample the ‘grass’ low enough for us to set up our tent. Our arms and legs were lacerated by razor-grass, and our bodies ached in shock. Yet we were in the highest of spirits—this was, after all, what we came here for, an adventure that would challenge us.
Over the following 28 days Jasper and I were transformed from boys into young men. We learned a huge amount, and endured a great deal. At times the situation looked near hopeless. Every headland we came to we were faced with either trying to shuffle along the face of a sheer, slippery cliff that plunged directly into the thundering waves of the Southern Ocean below, or climbing up and fighting across an endless mass of 5-metre-high scrub on top. Whenever even remotely possible, we’d opt for the cliff face—which goes some way to revealing the horrors of the scrub lurking on top.
On one memorable occasion, when faced with having to inch our way several hundred metres inland to get around a narrow gulch, Jasper fought hard to try and convince me that the easiest option was to pick a lull in the churning waves, plunge in and swim across and try to climb up the other side before the next set of ocean waves roared through. It was lucky we did not attempt this, however, as a few days later we spotted an enormous shark fin cruising the shallows. Occasionally, rocks we grasped for support gave way—pulling right out of the cliff face like books from a bookshelf. Looking back on it, we were very lucky to have escaped some near-disasters with only minor cuts and scratches.
Tasmania’s weather is notoriously wild, and with nowhere to go but onwards, we often found ourselves copping the full brunt of its unpredictability. A day might start out with a crisp, clear blue sky, yet by lunchtime we could be being lashed by heavy, near horizontal, frigid rain and even hail.
To make matters worse, we were constantly—and increasingly—hungry. I had made the fundamental mistake of underestimating the effect of hard work on our appetites, and we’d brought only about the same amount of food as we’d consumed each day on the Overland Track. After 28 days on this near-starvation diet, we came out looking like suitable candidates for World Vision sponsorship: sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, the lot. There were times when we tried to catch seagulls to eat, and pad out our evening meals with whatever we could find—minuscule shells we’d scraped from the rocks at low tide, even tiny fish, barely 10 centimetres in length, that we�
�d somehow caught with our hands in a rock pool.
It certainly wasn’t all bad, though. Sometimes, for example, we’d find ourselves walking along seemingly endless kilometres of pristine beach. Looking back over my shoulder, I’d gaze at our two pairs of footsteps trailing off into the distance until they were lost in the sun’s reflection off the wet sand. We were truly free—free to pick our own route, our own campsites, and our own challenges. At times like this as we plodded along, our minds were also freed, and I found myself thinking of nothing and everything—of life, and what really mattered. At home our minds are always so busy with things to do that we don’t often get a chance to deeply explore our thoughts. I felt fantastic, experiencing greatly amplified versions of those same feelings I had found so attractive on our earlier hiking holiday. Out there, where decisions suddenly had very real and potentially life-threatening consequences, I felt so much more alive. All my senses became more acute, taking everything in—I could hear the slightest noise in the distance, and detect the faintest whiff of drying kelp washed up on the shore, sometimes several bays ahead.
Unfortunately, sometimes our superhuman sense of smell worked against us. On Day 22 we found ourselves holding our burning noses as we gazed out over a particularly gruesome sight. The shorelines of the next two bays were strewn with the decomposing bodies of 110 long-finned pilot whales and 50 bottlenose dolphins, in a rare mixed-species stranding that had occurred a month or so earlier. Those images will stay with me for a long time, as will the memory of how impossible it is to hike with a heavy backpack—while trying not to breathe.
The same day we stumbled upon on a colony of Australian fur seals, complete with young pups. Conveying this find to marine scientists at the CSIRO later, we were told that unless these pups were freak births, we had potentially discovered the world’s most southerly breeding colony of these playful seals. All other known breeding colonies were several hundred kilometres north, in Bass Strait. To my delight, our findings were included in an official population and distribution report for the species.
Returning home from that expedition, I immersed myself in all the various ‘post-expedition’ tasks with enthusiasm. First there were over 300 photos on transparency film to develop, scan, colour-balance and crop. Then came the first opportunity to try out my writing skills—a two-page article in Australian Geographic, a few newspaper articles, and I even had an eight-page article translated into French and published overseas! This, I was sure, was going somewhere.
Public speaking was the next challenge, as the Australian Geographic Society had invited us to present a lecture to the paying public at their Sydney headquarters. To put it mildly, neither Jasper nor I enjoyed public speaking at school, but we soon learned that if you’re speaking on a topic that you’re genuinely enthusiastic about it’s actually kinda fun, and our talk—including an amusing demonstration of how an adventurer (that would be me) has to fight with a machete through a wall of scrub (warily played by Jasper)—was very well received. Other smaller speeches soon followed, including my giving the Valedictory Speech at my old high school for their Year 12 graduation ceremony—a precursor to the talk I did a year later when Dad overheard my Greenland plans. I tapped the microphone and began: ‘Well, a few weeks ago when I was invited to give the Valedictory Speech here tonight, I have to admit, I didn’t even know what “Valedictory” meant. After asking around, it seems it’s supposed to be when someone old and famous returns to their high school and talks about their life. I am obviously neither old nor famous, and in fact I was sitting where you are, just three short years ago.’ It served to highlight the fact that there’s no time like the present to chase your dreams. It was to be the first of many ‘motivational talks’ that I would give.
Our biggest post-expedition surprise came when Australian Geographic informed us that we were to be awarded their prestigious ‘Young Adventurer of the Year’ award for 2004, labelling our trek ‘One of the toughest foot journeys in the world’! We were flown down to Melbourne for the award ceremony on 9 June 2004, and we got our first real taste of mainstream media attention. We somehow survived an interview for TV and bluffed our way through our first live-to-air ABC radio interview. We thought the expedition was pretty scary at times—but I promise you, it all paled in comparison to doing a live interview. The only thing more terrifying than a live radio interview is a live TV interview, and luckily I’d have to wait for my next adventure before facing that horror.
During the ceremony, seeing our names and images displayed up there beside well-known adventurers who had been to the South Pole in home-made planes, or who had hauled sleds there on skis, felt incredibly surreal, and even a bit fraudulent. When it was over, the clouds we were walking on eventually led us back to the hotel room that Australian Geographic had paid for. At 21 years old, I had never actually spent a night in a hotel before—my ‘holidays’ had always involved tents. I lay on the bed scribbling idly away on the two complimentary sheets of letter paper beside the phone. I could get used to this, I decided. There must be some way of making a career out of adventuring.
Make a living out of adventuring: far, far easier said than done. For the remainder of 2004, my third year at university (although I had been so wrapped up in post-expedition work that I scarcely noticed), I pondered this problem. There were many potential sources of income from adventuring—writing articles and books, selling photographs, public speaking, or even making documentary films on my travels. I felt it would be hard to earn a decent living from any of these individual avenues, so instead I started practising them all. In this way, I convinced myself that there was a dim light at the end of the dreaded ‘office-work’ tunnel—or more correctly, a faint ‘exit’ light flashing before the tunnel ever really began.
Keen to experience some cold-climate hiking, I teamed up with another mate of mine, Karl Toppler, and he came with me back to the Overland Track, this time in July 2004, right in the middle of the harshest winter Tasmania had experienced in 25 years. The trip was just awesome. There was virtually no one else on the trail—just us and our toes. I mention our toes as a separate entity because there were times when they were so numb from cold that I seriously doubted they were still attached. At times I took my boots off to empty out what honestly felt like a rock in between my toes, only to discover that it was in fact just one of my senseless toes rubbing on those beside it. This hike served as my introduction to sub-zero expeditions, and I fell in love with the concept at once—numb toes and all. I was really keen to take the experience further—to try something longer and colder. The problem was, however, that not all of my friends were as enthusiastic as I was.
It was an uncanny coincidence, then, that within a few weeks of deciding I wanted to try something more extreme, Clark’s initial ‘Proposition’ email had found its way into my inbox.
PREPARATIONS, PAC BUILDING AND SPONSORS
Clark and I were going to need a hell of a lot more sponsorship for our Arctic expedition than I’d managed to get for Tasmania, but at least this time around I had better contacts and the credibility of an Australian Geographic award, as well as several very positive ‘sponsorship reference letters’ to slip into the back of our ever growing Expedition Document.
Before we could start chasing sponsors, however, we still had one or two minor details to sort out. For a start, we hadn’t yet found a suitable kayak for which we could build wheels. I unfolded our plans to a local kayak manufacturer, and he shook his head. ‘Nah. Listen, if you go putting 75 kilograms in each end of a kayak—even the strongest Kevlar-reinforced ones—stick it on a pair of wheels and bounce it across 1000 kilometres of tundra, it’s just gonna tear in half!’ I chose to ignore him, and presented my plans to another kayak outlet. By the third shop I was starting to detect a pattern, and as I slunk home, I began to worry about what this meant.
That night, Dad, being a mad-keen boat builder, cheerfully voiced what I dared not. ‘Well, you’ll just have to make your own kayaks then, I guess
.’
‘No. No way,’ I retorted. Clark and I were already drowning under our still-growing To-Do lists—we had no time for this. I counted on my fingers. It was currently April 2005, so we still had May … and … yeah. May. It was going to take all of June to send whatever kayaks we chose to Canada by cargo ship, and July was our start date. So, what, we had about seven weeks to come up with a design, get the materials together and build two of the world’s strongest kayaks in our garage …
‘Make it out of aluminium, it’ll probably only take a few weekends’ work in the garage,’ Dad said reassuringly. It’s true, we did have a remarkably well-equipped garage after all my parents’ yacht-building.
‘All right, I guess so,’ I agreed, adding ‘building kayaks’ to the list. It wasn’t like we had a choice.
Clark and I stared vacantly at my crude sketch of a kayak, unsure of quite how to begin. ‘So, we’re looking at each needing to float about 170 kilograms of food and equipment …’ I started.
‘And our weight on top of that,’ Clark pointed out.
‘Oh, yeah. That’s a good point.’ I drew a stick figure seated in the cockpit, and waited for further inspiration. That familiar feeling of biting off more than we could chew descended around us. A simplistic hull-design program from the internet allowed me to calculate the buoyancy of various contorted ‘yacht’ hulls, the front half of which vaguely resembled a kayak—at least it was pointed. Transporting objects longer than 4 metres starts to get difficult as well as expensive, so that defined our length. As for the width, I sat on a bench seat in the garden, and—using a grass-rake as a mock paddle—worked out how wide a kayak could be before paddling became impractical. The last important factor—the height—was simply determined by the displacement we needed to keep the whole contraption afloat under the load, with enough spare deck-height so waves wouldn’t just roll over us, but not so much that windage would be a problem. After a week or so playing with curves and buoyancies in my ‘spare time’, I came up with something that looked like it’d do the trick.