A Dangerous Business

The last week or so has been rather eye-opening, and not in a good way. As I (briefly) mentioned in my last post, I am undertaking two multi-day treks in preparation for my Te Araroa thru-hike, the first of these being the Carnarvon Great Walk, an 87 km loop in the aptly named Carnarvon National Park in south-west Queensland. It’s a trail that I have known about for a few years now and have always thought about doing someday.

The process that I’ve had to go through to get out here, however, has been very stressful. Carnarvon is a whole new beast compared to the well-maintained trails and huts on New Zealand’s Great Walks and Tassie’s Three Capes Track. No huts, no mobile signal, and at half of the campsites no toilets. And it’s the longest track I’ve ever attempted. And it’s the first one I’m doing solo. And there’s snakes to deal with.

Now that I’ve written all that out, it’s no wonder I feel like I may have bitten off more than I can chew. In hindsight, the smarter thing to do would’ve been to plan an overnight trip somewhere relatively close to home and then attempt something bigger. In a way, that’s kind of been my mindset most of my life. Going to pool parties when I was a kid, whilst all my mates were busy hurling themselves in with increasingly flamboyant cannonballs, I would be timidly standing on the steps, slowly inching my way in.

What I have – slowly – come to realise as I’ve gotten older is that the vast majority of the “what if” questions that I ask myself about these sort of situations are either completely ridiculous or can be easily solved. The main concern I had with pools as a kid was whether they’d be too cold to jump into. Hey guess what, past Jono? Even if they are, you get used to it pretty dang quickly. For Carnarvon, my biggest concern came down to having enough food and also knowing how to cook it (for the sake of my bank account, I don’t want to become solely reliant on freeze-dried meals). To be fair, this question has yet to be answered, but my confidence has grown a lot over the past few days as I’ve tested out different recipes at home. I’ve also got to remind myself that this trip is a test, the results of which will help make my experience on Te Araroa more enjoyable.

One of the other reasons why I chose to do Carnarvon was that my parents already had made plans to go out there with some of their friends. Whilst I head out west into the bush, they’ll be doing their own thing around the gorge. We split the journey over two days, staying overnight at Roma. After passing over the Great Dividing Range at Toowoomba, the road passes through hundreds of kilometres of flat farmland, making for a rather dull journey. The biggest source of excitement (for me anyway, I wasn’t driving!) was navigating around the many road trains that ply this highway.

It’s your typical rural Queensland town: colonial era buildings lining its main street, couple pubs and hotels, and a whole lot of caravans carrying mostly senior tourists. One thing that I learnt about Roma is its history of oil and natural gas drilling. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, several bore holes were drilled looking for artesian water. What they found instead were thin pockets of oil and gas, starting a bit of a gold rush-esque event as people tried to make their fortune. Long story short, there wasn’t enough dead dinosaur to make it economically viable. Most of the rigs were then abandoned and left to decay, but one ended up surviving and has become a tourist attraction, aptly known as The Big Rig.

The following day involved another lengthy drive to Carnarvon Gorge; 3 hours on top of the 5.5 hours needed to get to Roma. Did I mention that this trail is rather remote? However, the drive included a lengthy stop in the small town (if you could even call it that) of Injune… because I had a job interview. As I mentioned in my first post, I’ve just graduated from university. This whole plan of thru-hiking Te Araroa was borne out of a pretty bleak period in my studies. I just couldn’t see myself immediately jumping into a professional career and focussing the majority of my time on a job that I may or may not like doing. At the same time, I spent 6.5 years studying something I’m very passionate about, and if it was all for nothing I might go properly mad. Not to mention the sizeable HECS debt I’ve accrued (*cries in 7% indexation*). Now I’m just hoping and praying that I’ll be given an offer. I had a great experience with this company when I interned with them in the summer of 2022/23, so it’d be great to work there again.

After another 110 km of highway driving, we turned off onto the road to Carnarvon Gorge and got to enjoy the ancient sport of spotting-cows-on-the-unfenced-road.

Now, the main gorge walk has 4 side tracks along it and from what I’ve read, it’s worth doing all of them. This would have the side effect of adding a few klicks to my trip tomorrow, so to save a bit of time I did one of them as soon as we arrived at our accommodation, going to Moss Garden.

This bit of the trail is pretty high quality; very wide, shallow gradients, easy to follow. The only thing that I could find fault with was the fact that it was very sandy. Sand is very annoying to walk through for any lengthy amount of time, and if the rest of the track is like that I may turn into Anakin Skywalker (minus the killing of younglings).

Moss Garden is only 3.5 km one way, and without being laden down with a pack I made good time, arriving after only 45 minutes. It was clear to see how this place got its name, with bright green moss covering and hanging from the gorge walls like strands of hair. Water that had spent thousands of years filtering through the sandstone above me now got to see the light of day, trickling down these mossy tendrils. A small waterfall off the end of the boardwalk added a nice backing track to the surrounding area.

As expected with a national park, there was a lot of wildlife around. Mostly birds, along with the odd wallaby. Unfortunately, I did also come across a feral pig. It wasn’t anywhere near me where I could’ve been harmed, but it did confirm the reports I had read of their presence in the park. I’m hoping they’re only found around the gorge; if they’re up on the tableland, I don’t exactly want them breaking into my food whilst I sleep.

A final meal together with my parents and their gang awaited me when I got back to camp. This time tomorrow, I’ll be 25 km west cooking over a tiny propane stove and sleeping in a tiny 1 person tent. Seems a bit surreal writing that out, but that’s what I’ve signed up for. Obviously, I won’t be posting whilst on trail. My plan is to write up each day’s post up there and release them daily once I get mobile reception back. That’ll be the next you’ll hear from me. Unless I become a news headline. I really don’t want to become a news headline.