Before I started my first proper hike, I practised for several weeks walking with a small pack and new boots on the stretch of car-heavy road that took me from Bellevue Hill to my office in Surry Hills in Sydney.
The main thoroughfare I walked down was flat and covered in bitumen. Bus fumes hung in the air. The scenery was OK, I guess; lots of Thai massage places and curry houses down lower Oxford Street, the army barracks and abandoned dress shops on upper Oxford Street. This was my training for a multi-day affair carrying a massive pack around a remote tropical island. In the weeks before I went I was dogged by an anxious feeling – that hiking may not be for me, that I hadn’t adequately prepared. But I guessed the only way to find out was to try it.
Hinchinbrook Island, 53km long and 10km wide, off the north Queensland coast, is part of the Great Barrier Reef marine park. It is famous for its walks. People who knew of it described it as one of the “must-do walks before you die”, up there with some of Australia’s best treks including the Larapinta Trail and Cradle Mountain. It takes close to five days to walk the 32km Thorsborne Trail along the east coast of the island. In theory.
To get there you fly to Townsville, then transfer to Cardwell before getting a boat to the island. There are no facilities or vehicles allowed on the island and only 40 people are permitted at a time, to preserve the island’s pristine and diverse environment. We planned to camp, hence the large packs. I was hiking with a group of other journalists and some local rangers who knew the park well. As we arrived we saw the peak of Mount Bowen, 1,121 metres above sea level, looming ahead. Marking our departure from the material world, to the more sublime – and in my case more difficult – natural world.
I was an inexperienced hiker and a relative novice at camping too. I’d only spent a few nights here and there in a tent. But I’d always enjoyed it. I loved how quickly it forces you into an ancient rhythm – bed soon after sundown and waking with the dawn; no ceiling except for the stars, the earthy smell of the ground so close beneath your pillow. And it’s hard to overstate the beauty and wonder of Hinchinbrook Island: there’s something Jurassic about it. For a relatively small island, it contains an extraordinary diversity of geography.
Peaks rise up dramatically not far from the shore, there are dense thickets of mangroves and outcrops of granite rocks. We walked through heath, sparser areas of gumtrees, down to gullies and rainforests, across damp creek beds, along sheltered beaches, wide beaches, sandy coves, past the tops of waterfalls. Dugongs swim in the waters around the island (as do crocodiles). There are snakes and eagles, as well as brilliantly bright Monarch butterflies. Some of my fellow hikers discovered the remains of fishing traps and shellfish fossils belonging to the area’s first people, the Bandjin, just off the track.
Hiking – or major surgery?
Day one’s walk was only 6.5km – nothing, right? I could do that in an hour or two, just like walking from home to Surry Hills or along the cliff walk from Bondi to Bronte and back or from La Trobe street to the MCG. And day one was OK. Well, the first 10 minutes of day one was OK.
We walked along the beach, a bright 30-degree autumn’s day, sand firm beneath our feet. My pack felt weird though – a lot heavier than my practice pack that I had taken along Oxford Street, which contained some books and yoga clothes. In this pack I carried a tent, a sleeping bag, a mat, enough food for five days, clothes (including really bulky socks), toilet paper, two torches, a phone, a couple of chargers (including a battery one), lollies, snacks and three litres of water that came from a weird bladder/hose thing that I kept in the top of my backpack to suck while walking. With its tube and bag, it looked alarmingly like something you’d wake up attached to after major surgery.
The other thing about my pack was that it was not actually my pack. It belonged to a friend and colleague, Patrick Keneally, who is taller than me, with broader shoulders. As we walked along that first sandy stretch it became apparent that as well as being heavy, the pack was going to be a real irritant. The right shoulder strap kept slipping off, unbalancing me, and the fidgeting and adjusting, and pushing up, and leaning forward and shifting of weight and fiddling with the straps never really stopped until I took the pack off – a pleasure so sublime and so physical that I actually moaned with joy every time the load fell from my shoulders.
But before I could take the pack off, I had to walk. After 10 minutes of flat beach we got to the boulders – huge things that looked like they’d been hurled on to the beach by an angry god. Apart from swimming around them, the only way through was to climb over them, which didn’t seem right, as this was a hike, not a climb.
The others leapt from boulder to boulder before disappearing from sight. It would be hours before I would see them again. I was slow. My legs weren’t long enough and my arms weren’t strong enough to negotiate the boulders with ease. To make matter worse when I launched myself on to the next boulder and tried to haul myself up it (grazing the inside of my arms), the weight of the pack and the loose straps pulled me backwards, leading to the sensation that I was about to lose my grip, fall back and dash my head on the rocks below. When I was not trying to drag myself up the rocks, I was frozen in fear.
On a couple of the boulders I managed to take my pack off and hurl it up the rocks, so I didn’t tip backwards. The rangers we were travelling with, seeing I was struggling, positioned themselves above and below me.
The one below grasped the back of my pack and shoved it forward, giving me upwards momentum. The other ranger, on the boulder above, grabbed my hand and pulled me up.
This continued for another half a dozen boulders, until we got to an area that didn’t involve climbing, but instead walking across rocks of different sizes, surface areas, degrees of slipperiness.
Before the hike, I’d been warned by many that it wasn’t the snakes or the crocodiles, instead it was the small things that could do you in – the twisted ankle, for example caused by slipping in between the rocks. There were many things I needed to think about during this hike, there was a lot on my mind – but walking over those rocks everything became narrowed to a laser point. I was too focused on looking down to see the scenery, too focused on each step to think about anything else. It was like purest form of meditation (but horrible).
The possibility of injury kept me focused on the crossing but the shame of injury also drove me on. A few years ago a family friend – a very experienced bushwalker – had to be rescued by the navy from an island near Hinchinbrook after he became lost. He was even on the news. On the boat on the way over, our skipper spoke about a woman who managed to call (how? there was no phone signal) the mainland to be rescued because she had a sore foot. We hooted with derision, then wondered – wasn’t that a criminal offence to get rescued for a minor ailment?
Food was another challenge. The island had no shops so we had to bring it in – bags of dehydrated stuff that was too bizarre to contemplate closely: lamb and red wine risotto, beef rendang, satay chicken, apple pie, yoghurt and muesli, all of it looking the same. Stopping at a clearing for lunch or dinner, we boiled up water on stoves we bought in (no fires allowed), then put it in a bag for 10 minutes. To open the bag and look at the food while it was still in utero was to confront an existential horror – the lamb growing and expanding inside the bag – the colour and texture of cement, the risotto bloating, but somehow not softening and tasting of soil.
My fellow hikers competed with each other about whose meal was the most disgusting. Chicken tikka masala, roast beef and the cooked breakfast were frontrunners. The worst though was not finishing the meal and having to take a combination congealed/powdery protein meal – half-eaten, around in your pack with you for the rest of the week due to the fact that there were no bins on the island. I’ll never forget the sensation in the middle of the night of sticking my hand into my backpack, reaching for toilet paper but instead copping the remnants of sausage and mash, my fingers recoiling when they touched the wet scraps.
Somehow I managed to get through day one without dying, doing my ankle or collapsing from exhaustion. Stopping was the best bit.
The dubious pleasure of excrement from carpet snakes
We camped at Little Ramsay Bay, on the beach. It was lovely, just like I imagined an island paradise to be. I even enjoyed a furtive swim, despite the warnings that there were crocodiles in the region. Sitting on the beach as the sun went down, we passed around a bag of goon, and stirred our dinner in our little bags. I fell in a creek getting water and ended up filling my three-litre bladder with stagnant water that had algae floating in it and felt a little bit sick later but at least I was no longer wearing my pack, which was something.
Day two (10km) turned out not to be so great either. My pack was adjusted and I was strapped into like an astronaut about to be launched into space. But as I set off walking, something was happening to my legs. They were like jelly. I know that’s a common expression; but they actually felt like I imagine jelly would feel. I quickly dropped behind the group.
The two rangers stayed with me, one closely behind me, and one closely in front. Again, I needed them there, to push me up rocks and pull me from creek beds. There were many boulders to clamber over and the only way I could get through it was for someone behind me to boost, or sort of throw my pack forward, propelling me on to the next rock while the ranger in front of me grabbed my arm and hauled me up.
What was the point of this, I wondered, finding it impossible to take in the beauty of the island under such stressful circumstances.
By mid-morning we had fallen well behind the rest of the group. There were scheduled stops at waterfalls and swimming holes. There were trees to sit under and drink ginger wine and gaze up at butterflies. There were powdered beef satays to eat. But we didn’t even have time to stop for breaks. The rangers became worried that we would be stuck out there in the night. The ground underneath us in the lower, more tropical parts of the island had a curious stench – one I had never smelt before.
“Excrement from carpet snakes,” a ranger explained.
On we kept walking until it became more like a march. The rangers fashioned me a stick which I used to heave myself up goat tracks and to slow my progress as we went down steeply on the other side. Sometimes it felt safer to slide down the track on my backside as the path pitched steeply. At other parts the track was light and flat – Hinchinbrook’s famous biodiversity in action again – a sparse wood of tall ghost gums and a flowing brown river that was all so stunning and bucolic, if only I could stop, take off my pack and lie under the tree.
But down we descended again to the narrow track, riveted with branches growing underfoot, the smell of snake shit and the creek crossings. They were the worst. I fell in maybe six creeks, sometimes multiple falls each creek – to the front, to the side, on my back – getting wet, cut, bruised, lower lip trembling as I almost but didn’t quite cry. It was the closest I have ever come to feeling like a toddler again.
In the months before I went on the hike, I frequently had a tightness in my chest – a sensation that I was about to have a heart attack. I went to the doctor, and had a heap of tests. Nothing. The problem it seemed, was in my head. Just a simple case of anxiety.
Walking through the jungle I could feel my chest tightening again and my breath becoming shallow. Was this it? Heart attack time? A friend of mine who had walked the Kokoda Track had two men on his group die of heart failure while hiking. But if I loosened my pack then it would pull me backwards and that could result in me falling backwards and hitting my head and dying. The rangers would have to stay by my body until daybreak then climb a peak and signal a passing ship.
The rangers – tough Queenslanders who knew and loved this island, walked ahead cutting through the thicker areas with machetes. The conversation kept my mind off the heart attack I thought inevitable: we talked about the cultural relativism of female genital mutilation and witch burning in Papua New Guinea, whether people in cities are unfriendly compared with country people, who was the slowest walker they’ve ever had on the track. I liked them a lot and but couldn’t help but feel guilty about what a drain I was on their resources. They were hobbling now a little as well, after being forced to walk so slowly (it’s apparently harder on the body to walk slowly than it is to walk fast).
Finally we arrived at a beach. Surely this was the end? Dark was falling. I was bent in half, over my stick. My socks and pants were soaked from falling in the creek. My back hurt. Everything hurt.
The other hikers put up my tent. I collapsed inside without any supper. Day three was meant to be harder.
But I felt I could not go on. I was collected by a team of coastguards at 6am the next morning and taken over rough seas to the mainland. An ambulance was waiting for me at the dock. My hike ended early, but not too soon.
Beaten from the inside
There’s kind of a narrative creeping into hiking – something different to the daggy bushwalking tropes from the 70s and 80s, something our fathers and mothers with their long socks and tins of insect repellent and non-hiking boots (indeed their entire lack of expensive kit) didn’t carry with them in their heads while they were walking.
It’s the heroes’ journey – human versus the elements. But it’s not just that. There’s the metaphysical aspect of hiking – the fact that when you walk, you work things out, that something becomes unknotted, that the longer and harder the track, the more your physical labours will seep into the sickness that might lie in your soul.
To stay at home, watch television or sleep is to fester or remain inert. But to walk, particularly to walk hard somewhere isolated, is to take action – to somehow beat the thing inside you from the outside, in.
I had also read Cheryl Strayed’s hugely popular hiking memoir Wild. She shot heroin the night before she walked the trail – and in the hard graft of the walk worked her life out.
The act of walking itself – conquering or at least completing a trail, was more than just a completion. It had – and I thought would have for me – a metaphysical component. But instead of conquering my anxiety, it made it a lot worse.
What does it mean then to be beaten by the hike? (Or rather to be beaten by yourself, unprepared for the hike). People who go on these things are meant to return triumphant – sore but elated by a sense of accomplishment. But I returned feeling embarrassment and shame.
I was discharged from the hospital without any money or ID (they were locked in the ranger’s car in Cardwell) and via a few phone calls some very kind people at a motel in Lucinda took me in until the group returned. I stayed in my room during the day and read, scratching my sandfly bites and drinking wine with the motel owners at night. They’ve had interesting lives: a rancher in Texas, a cardiac nurse in Brisbane. They tried to make me feel better by saying: “Well, I couldn’t do that walk.”
Two days later the group returned after completing the hike and told me that day three wasn’t too hard and day four was a short dawdle down the beach. “You could have made it.”
I returned to Sydney to a massive ambulance bill and regular physiotherapy sessions. Sometimes you’ve got to pick your battles.
