Part Three: Climbing in Oz

Part Three:  Climbing in Nowra

It turned out that we did not take the most direct route to Nowra, which would have been about 12 hours.  Our route took two days. 

Day one included the packing and the saying goodbye’s, which took most of the day.   We also stopped to get a guidebook from the local climbing store, which didn’t open until 1:30 and so we had some lunch while we waited.  We technically didn’t leave Arapiles until after 2:00 by which time the skies had cleared, though I still believe it was going to be very bad weather all week.

Ant had suggested we drive down the Great Ocean Road so that I would be able to see the coastline – which was very beautiful.  We stopped the first night at the top of the Great Ocean Road, spent the night there and then drove the road in the morning.  We still managed to somehow miss the most photographed spot, which I blame on poor signage and the fact it was raining.

At this point, my driving skills had improved immeasurably.  Ant had helped me figure out the roundabout business, which involves a complex set of turning signal maneuvers it turns out.  Mostly I just turned my blinker on and off in both directions while in the roundabouts to make sure other drivers have no idea where I am going and so won’t try to enter the roundabout in front of me.

Our GPS had for reasons not clear to me, taken us along some pretty rural roads, including one where you only got to drive with one wheel on pavement when cars were approaching you, to get to the Great Ocean Road.  The next day was all driving and it wasn’t until the third day that we arrived in Nowra, got our bearings and drove out to the climbing area.

We stopped at a cool waterfall on the way.

These are best approach shoes ever, though I would not have chosen green if there had been other options besides purple.

 

Unlike Arapiles, Nowra is a sandstone sport climbing area, meaning that there are pre-placed bolts in the rock and everything is a single pitch (less than ½ a rope length).   It makes things easier to set up and take down and you don’t have to figure out how to get off the rock you just climbed because sport routes don’t go all the way to the top.  The Nowra rock overlooks the river and is surrounded by trees.  It is kinda a mixture of the Red River Gorge in Kentucky and the New River Gorge in West Virginia, except with eucalyptus trees.

Our first day was getting our bearings and trying some of the easier climbs again, though I hoped that this time we would be able to move beyond the introductory day without it raining on us.  Since we started in the early afternoon, we only got a few climbs in before we decided to head out, figure out the camping situation, and get everything set up. 

The campground turned out to be directly across the river from where we were climbing but you had to go all the way back into town, past the local kangaroo population, across the river, then out the other side.  Everyone else is very blasé about kangaroos and considers them to be stupid and pests, but I still think they are pretty cool. 

As we entered the campground for the first time, I saw my first and only wombat – which was sort of scuffling away in the bushes.  I didn’t get to see it very close.  They are very shy it turns out.

This picture of darkness includes a wombat, which you can't really see but is the only picture I got.

The campground was a step up from the one in Arapiles in the sense that it had flushing toilets and you could pay for a shower if you wanted one, but the “amenities block” as it was called didn’t have any heat so there was still a pretty heavy disincentive to get your head wet.  The temperatures were not that cold – ranging from 10 to 14 degrees Celsius.  I actually have no idea what that means, but I think it was around 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit. 

A Kookaburra that was not at all afraid of us

Mel trying to feed it -- but it didn't want bread only meat

The Germans taking a picture of the Kookaburra

We were still in primitive camping mode, so were cooking over a white gas/open flame stove and using our climbing packs as chairs.  The amenities for the campers didn’t extend to picnic tables.  This situation was generally fine except the night there was a spider next to me, at which point I did the spider dance, which involves a lot of jumping up and down and arm flailing.  We then spent a lot of time tracking down the spider and killing it while I worried it had managed to leap into the tent. 

Given I am under the impression that all spiders and snakes in Australia are deadly poisonous, and I don’t like crawly things sneaking up on me in the dark, the spider did not survive long enough to be identified as harmless or poisonous. 

In general, I spent a lot more time thinking about poisonous spiders and snakes climbing in Australia than I do elsewhere – spiderwebs on climbs added an additional element of excitement.  Ant assured us that as long as we stayed away from the tunnel webs, the other spiders wouldn’t kill us outright, but that is small comfort, really.  It helps to climb in the winter because snakes are not so active then.  The only snake I saw outside the wildlife preserve, where they were carefully enclosed behind glass, was a dead brown snake (poisonous) that I drove over in the car.  I didn’t drive over it on purpose and it wasn’t me that killed it, it had already been well flattened before I drove over it.  Ant saw it while I was looking elsewhere and so I had to stop the car and take a picture of it.  

This snake is not alive

There were some other climbers also staying at the campground and they invited us over to share their campfire.  When we first arrived, there were quite a few Canadians and two Germans.  The Canadians slowly left over the week we were there until there were two left – Mel and Rob.  The German numbers went from two to one when Jakob left to go do something else and Fabian stayed to climb with the Canadians. 

View from campground of one of the main Nowra walls

The week spent in Nowra followed a pattern something like this:

Get up in the morning and make tea/coffee.

Have breakfast.

Wait for the sun to be up a little to warm things up.

Go climbing.

Come back at dark.

Make dinner.

Hang out at the campfire.

Sleep.

Do over.

I won’t go into detail about the sport climbing. Unlike multi-pitch climbing and mountaineering, sport climbing does not lend itself to getting lost or stuck on a route.  At the worst, you might have to leave a biner if you can’t finish the route.  Sport climbing tends to be about getting the moves and trying to climb your hardest possible route without falling.  If you do fall, then you should try the route again to get the “redpoint,” which means having already climbed the route but now trying to do it without falling.  Falling is assumed in sport climbing, though you still have to consider the implications of a fall, especially if taken near the ground.

Most sport climbing conversations go something like this imaginary conversation between two climbers:

“Dude, that route was totally awesome, man.”

“Cool – I might give it a go.”

“You totally should, like, the move by the second bolt is super positive – but you have to throw to that jug.”

“Is that crimper good? Cause I will need a intermediate.”

“It is bomber, dude, but like, just throw for the ledge and stick that.”

“Are you going to go for the redpoint after this?”

“Yeah, I’ll go for the redpoint but then I’m done – I am so thrashed.”

“OK, I might fall around that second bolt where it looks thin.”

“Yeah, but after that, the climb is really rad – go for the onsight, man.”

You get the picture – mostly you describe a series of moves that are hard and it helps if you do it like you are a mid-twenties dude, because this is, after all, the bulk of the sport climbing world. 

One of the harder climbs I did -- a 23 that involved some big and reachey moves.

Mel Climbing a 21 or something like that -- very thin and cheese gratery

I took this picture primarily to demonstrate the size of the eucalyptus tree which was very large

Ant and I were well over the average age hanging out at Nowra.  Obviously, by this time in life we are all supposed to have settled down, had kids, and gotten real jobs that don’t give you enough time off to travel around Australia climbing.  Clearly I have not followed this path, which is why many people consider me to be a failure. 

This turned out to be a really fun climb despite the requirement that I use a heel hook.  Despite its overhanging angle, it is only a 20 (5.10aish) -- I flashed it.  This was Fabian's attempt.

Rob climbing a 24 I probably should have done -- looked really fun. However, it is hard to trust the beta of someone over 6 feet tall on how easy something is.

For example, if you are 5.8 -- how do you clip that?  On the one 24 I did that he set the draws on, it took me three extra moves to get to the ledge he just threw for.

 

 

 

 

I did generate some level of respect from the 20-something German who hoped he would be climbing as hard as I do when he is my age.  Oh, the days when I thought people in their 40’s were old too!  Of course, back then I couldn’t lift my own body weight or climb 5.12a, so as I told my 20-something German buddy, I never want to be the person who lives in some past where I was better than I am now or where the real adventure was.  My philosophy is to figure out what is next, keep learning, and work to master what I want to accomplish. There is still way too much to do in this world and my only regret is that I didn’t start soon enough – in my 20s. 

All the other campers have already figured out that you need to start exploring early.  They were all on extensive year-long trips that involved working when they could and climbing as much as possible.  The Canadians, Mel and Rob, had started on what they had thought would be a one-year trip which had now become a three-year trip, but they are still going.  They think they will end up back in B.C. at some point, but who knows?

Ant and I climbed for six days straight and the hardest climbs I led were a few 23s and one 24.  If I got the translations correct, these equate to 11.b/c and 11.d/12a respectively.  The climbing was really fun and surprisingly, it didn’t rain much at all.  I didn’t go for the redpoint on anything hard because I wanted to climb more routes instead of work specific ones.  I wish I had been able to climb more, though.

Incredibly fun climb that goes to the right of the hueco and then up and out the top -- 19 I think.

A 23 -- one of my harder climbs.  It goes straight up from the left of the flake to some pretty thin moves at the top.  I was close to the onsight when my foot came off and I fell having almost completed the crux.  I was not so happy about that.  Then it took me a few more tries to get the entire climb -- really fun though.

Also fun and amazing was the campfire nights.  Ant had brought his guitar with him from Arapiles but it had a broken string and so it took a few nights to get the string and everything in order, but once it was all working again, he provided us with music. Another Australian joined us a few nights – Andy – who seemed to be living in his RV and traveling for work.  He also played the guitar and the two of them did some awesome campfire entertaining.

Germans sitting around the campfire

It is hard to think of a better way to spend your evening than to sit around the campfire with amazing music staring at the Southern Cross and the Milky Way as seen from the Southern Hemisphere.  My first time seeing the Southern Cross. 

All this time, I continued my efforts to see another wombat.  Everyone else saw them everywhere.  Ant would say, “oh, I just saw three of them over by the amenities block,” or Mel would say, “I chased one down by the river last night.”  Alas, I did not see another wombat.  Mel even took me wombat hunting one evening where we wandered around the trailer park section of the campground to places she had seen them.  Then, we went over to the “bush,” meaning forest section, where Mel initiated me into the finer aspects of wombat investigation by clapping her hands loudly and listening to all the rustling in the bushes.  We did hear lots of rustling, but no wombats came running out.  Sadly, I never did get to see another one.

Our last day in Nowra was fairly short.  We packed up the tent and stuff, climbed a few last climbs then headed into Sydney.  Plan G was to spend the night in Sydney and then perhaps head out to the Blue Mountains for another day of climbing there.  However, this plan got derailed and I ended up heading to the Blue Mountains solo, which meant the end of the climbing section of the trip. 

Plan H, then, involved lots of hiking in a fantastically beautiful place.  I took way more pictures of the hiking than I did of the climbing, in part because I was by myself and also the scenery was really amazing.  The first day simply involved me getting there, getting a hotel room, and wandering about a bit.  I picked a totally random hike, which was fairly unappealing, but a bit of exercise. 

The next day I asked at the National Park Visitors center what hikes I should do and the woman gave me two.  Both involved significant elevation changes as you hiked into the canyons and back out, saw waterfalls, streams, and pretty vegetation.  They both required 3-4 hours to complete, but given this assessment was for normal visitors, I did both of them in an hour and ½ each.  

I think I saw a lyrebird, but I am not sure.  It was totally uninterested in looking at me or moving into a position where I could get an appealing photo of it.  

Possible Lyrebird being very uncooperative about getting photographed.

I like hikes that include really dark tunnels and doors in the middle of the wilderness

The other side of the Blue Mountains -- going down

To state the obvious, there are lots of waterfalls -- this is at the top of one.

 

My final day back in Sydney included some walking around the central district, having lunch with a colleague, trying to figure out how to return the rental car to the airport in massive rush hour traffic, and spending my last few hours drinking some Australian wine at the airport bar.

Given that it is winter, I feel lucky that I was able to climb as much as I did.  I now have a better idea of what traveling in Australia is like and it no longer scares me to drive on the opposite side of the road.

I bought a climbing guidebook for the Blue Mountains because there is much to climb there and I want to return to do some of the climbing I wasn’t able to do this trip. 

Besides, I really want to see another wombat.

Part Two: Learning to Drive and Trying to Climb

So, any travel requires the flexibility to make multiple tiers of plans in order to get where you need to go.  Such is true with my quest to climb in Australia.

The original plan was that my climbing partner, Ant, would get me in Melbourne in his van and we would drive out to the Arapiles where we would then be able to climb for a week or so before driving down to Sydney, do a bit more climbing, and then I would depart from Sydney for home.  This seemed like an easy enough plan to me, especially given it did not involve me having to know much about Australian geography. 

In pursuit of this plan, let’s call it Plan A, I have dragged this enormous golf bag/portaledge all over creation which makes travel by bus or train slightly difficult. 

The first snag in the plan emerged when Ant informed me that his car had broken down a few weeks prior in some part of the country nowhere near where we wanted to be and so he had no transportation.  I of course only learned of this a few days before I was supposed to get to Arapiles.

The new revised plan, Plan B, was that he would make it into Melbourne via bus and I would rent a car and then we would drive back out to Arapiles together, thus alleviating the entire drive on the left side of the road thing for me.  Also, Ant informed me that kangaroos, like deer, like to jump in front of the car in an effort to kill themselves and you.  So he felt it would be prudent if he were in the car on my first backwards driving attempt, in case a kangaroo jumped out from nowhere.

Plan B also was not a go when Ant didn’t make it to Melbourne by missing the bus.  It was kind of a stupid plan requiring a lot of unnecessary driving on his part anyway.

However, it made Plan C, the part where I rent and drive a car out of the city of Melbourne on my own to meet Ant in the town of Horsham, the current operative plan.  Generally speaking, I have managed to avoid driving in countries other than the U.S. and certainly in countries where they drive on the left hand side of the road. 

This was about to change.

With the car rented, I checked out of the hotel, left my extensive luggage in the lobby and walked around the corner were conveniently the rental car agency road was.  Melbourne seems to tend to concentrate like things all together – all the electronics stores on one street, all the rental car agencies on another, all the Italian restaurants, etc.  Fortunately, the rental car concentration in the city was right by the hotel.  For reasons I cannot understand, Alamo was cleverly disguised as a company called Europcar and it took me some amount of time to figure this out.  Nobody I asked had ever heard of Alamo.

I had rented the economy standard vehicle, which meant that I was going to be driving a 5-speed off the deck, so to speak, or in this case, out of the basement parking garage.  I figured that if you are going to have to learn to drive backwards, you might as well increase the complexity by having to shift backwards too.  Besides, the race- car driver in me loves driving manual transmission cars and while the Prius has many benefits, it is kinda boring to drive. 

My car turned out to be a bright yellow Skoda.  I have no idea who makes this car, I assume somewhere in Europe because it was adorable in a European sort of way.  I was a bit struck by how bright yellow it was, especially given it was the only yellow vehicle in the entire parking garage.  

I have since gone on to test the theory that bright yellow is not a color favored by Australians. It would seem that I am driving one of the only bright yellow cars besides taxicabs in the entire country.  I have now studied this empirically over 2,600 kilometers of driving.

Australians drive a lot of cute European cars, they also drive this strange vehicle that looks like a retro 70s muscle car, is made by Ford, but I think is actually new.  There are also versions not made by Ford around as well.  Different permutations of these, like mini-trucks, really, are everywhere.

Perhaps the most quintessential Australian car I have encountered looks like this:

The bars on the front are for hitting kangaroos, though I am sure this is not done intentionally.  Rather, they are standing in the road a lot and jump in all sorts of directions.  It is advised to avoid hitting wombats, which while sort of small are evidently quite solid and have been known to turn over trucks when struck.  There are signs everywhere warning against hitting all the different animals.

This sign combined all the things you shouldn't hit in the area onto one sign

The plastic thing that looks like a spotlight is actually a scuba device for the engine so that you can drive your car underwater.  Evidently, Australians have to drive under water a lot and this allows the engine to continue to function when otherwise it would probably go ahead and die.

My suspicious that the color yellow is not ordinary for Australians was further confirmed when this elderly couple – the kind that travel around pulling an adorable Eurocar behind their RV – randomly drove into our campsite one day and asked if it would be ok to take a picture of my yellow Skoda.  They claimed they needed it for some sort of contest they were in and the only other yellow car they knew about was never stationary and so they couldn’t get a picture of it.   

Yellow also has the benefit, however, of making me easy to spot if I ended up on the wrong side of the road.  My driving mantra was “stay left” for the first week or so.

Back in the parking garage, after spending considerable time trying figuring out how things worked and getting the occasional stare from the rental car people who must have wondered if I actually planned to leave the garage. The backwards shifting wasn’t going to be too bad because at least the clutch and brake were in the same places. It took me a long time to figure out where the lights were until I looked on the opposite side of the steering wheel for that as well.

I finally had no more excuses for staying in the parking garage and I was going to have to hit the road.

My initial goal was to make as few right turns as possible and try to avoid hitting anything. I was planning my route accordingly. 

Out of the garage, I had to make one right turn, almost hitting a woman in a wheelchair in the process (actually one of those mobile cart thingys) and then two lefts to get back to the hotel.  I survived this trip without harm and gained considerable confidence in the process. 

The bright yellow car was quite sporty and easy to maneuver.  After picking up my luggage from the hotel, I spent another considerable chunk of time sitting in front of the hotel, trying to figure out the GPS system and see if it was going to take me out of the city without taking any right turns. 

Realizing I couldn’t just sit in front of the hotel all day, I proceeded to employ the following strategy to get out of Melbourne.  First, sort of listen to the GPS, but more importantly, and secondly, follow the cars in front of me.  This is a tactic I learned from reading Douglas Adams’ less popular book, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul and it works quite nicely most of the time – if you are lost or don’t know where you are going, just follow the car in front of you, at least until they end up at their home.  The follow-the-car-in-front-of-you strategy was especially important when going around roundabouts, which simply did me in conceptually.  Double-decker backwards roundabouts simply can’t exist simultaneously in my brain with other thoughts.

During this initial driving bonanza, I had feared that at some point my mind would simply dissolve into a morass of confused directions and I would end up screaming and taking my hands off the steering wheel as I careened into oncoming traffic.  Fortunately, this didn’t happen and I made it safely out of town and successfully drove the three hours to Horsham without having to turn right at all except to follow cars onto a freeway.  I also didn’t see any suicide mission kangaroos.

I was to meet Ant, my climbing partner, at the public library.

Ant at the moment basically lives at Arapiles in a tent.  He is what we call in the climbing world a dirtbag climber.  These are people who travel and live for climbing, have eliminated most worldly necessities and instead spend all their money on gear and the minimal needs living in a tent requires.  I was bringing the portaledge for Ant and for a future climb we had planned.  The portaledge is more expensive than his current dwelling, which is a K-mart plastic tent.

The whole dirtbag thing means that most climbers access to the Internet through free places like the library.  Charging phones and stuff has to be done whenever possible from public resources given that climber campgrounds tend to be primitive and without any modern conveniences, like running water or toilets, so Internet access is out of the question.   The Mt. Arapiles campground had a very nice pit toilet facility and a water catchment system for drinking water that says not to drink it.   There are no other facilities and all the climbers there are living in tarp covered tent cities.  Many, like Ant, have been there for several months now.  They have put up the required slack line.

For some reason Ant’s phone could receive text messages but not send them and I had bought a cheap pre-paid cell phone in order to be in contact.  Given I was driving the only bright yellow car around, I was easy to spot. 

After meeting up outside the public library, we stopped to get tea and coffee, because that is just what Australians do.  I have to admire a country that asks if you want milk with your tea – and also makes a good cup of tea, unheard of in the U.S.  Also, technically, Ant and I have never met in person – we met via the Internet when we were both looking for climbing partners about a year ago.  Thus, the tea/coffee stop was what I would call the “we have not ever met before but need to establish some level of trust before driving off into the dark wilderness together” meeting.

Next the provisioning began – we went to the Safeway to get food for the next few weeks, which was a really interesting experience.  Australians, for example, don’t refrigerate their eggs, but the pet food was refrigerated in the meat isle.  You can also buy kangaroo meat at the Safeway, which we did.  All that brand names are different and so it took a long time to wander around and figure out what I wanted. 

Over the next few days we also spent a lot of time at the local K-Mart, which is big in Australia.  There were lots of camping supplies that needed to be purchased, including a cheap 4-person additional tent for the roadtrip part of the adventure. 

Laden with a lot of food, mostly because I wasn’t too clear on how much to buy, we finally headed out to the campsite, which is about 20 miles out of Horsham – in the dark.

The camping ground was at the base of Mt. Arapiles and Ant’s campsite was close to a group of school kids.  He had two tents – the K-mart plastic tent, which he generously let me use and a two-person tent he was using to store gear.  When we arrived things were a bit in disarray.  Ant said that his friend and her kids had been camping there for a few days and had just left.  The evidence was in the form of lots of little kid sleeping blankets and a pillow with a pink princess on it.  Personally, I think Ant just didn’t want to admit that the princess pillow and the power ranger sleeping bag was his.

Given it was dark, Ant started a fire and we got things a bit organized which required moving stuff around in the two tents.  The golf bag/portaledge went into the bigger tent with me, since it is the size of a human being, and we moved Ant’s mattress and stuff into the other tent. 

Climbers are not late night people because the fire dies and it gets cold.  Darkness in Australia this time of year is about 5:30 so we didn’t stay up late, which poses problems for me since I wake up early anyway.  It doesn’t get light until 7:30 or so and so my goal was to try to sleep at least until it was light.  I will say I slept a lot and pretty well on the trip which makes me wonder if I should just go live in a tent somewhere.

The next morning dawned blue and beautiful and cold.  

View of Mt. Arapiles

 I managed to fill the water bottles from the catchment tank and tried to figure out how to make tea, but to no avail.  There was no fuel for the jetboil stove and it turned out that Ant was just boiling water by making a fire and sticking a pan in the flames – this is a level of primitive camping to which I had not yet been exposed.  I had sort of assumed car camping, which is basically what we are doing, would include a few extra amenities – like a stove.

Bird by the water supply

I got the hang of the boiling water in a fire pit after the first day.

Given that Ant and I had not yet climbed together and we had moved through the, so you are not a serial killer part of the test, today was the, “so you say you are a climber but now you have to demonstrate that you know what you are doing” sort of day.   

View from base of climbing area at Arapiles

Ant geared up for the first lead of the day (at noon)

As a sometimes guide, I know firsthand that people often overestimate their abilities and also tend to talk themselves up when trying to impress people.  My strategy is always to do the opposite – to make sure that I am as honest as possible about what I can climb.  However, climbing difficulty ranges given the type of climbing you are doing and the rating given to the climbing by the local community.  In other words, it isn’t an exact science.  It also means it is a good idea to begin on something pretty easy to get a feel of the area and your climbing partner.

Ant doesn’t really function on what I call capitalist time, meaning that once you live in a tent and climb all the time, you stop worrying about time almost all together.  It was noon before we meandered up to the cliffline, which was all of a five-minute walk from the tent to do our first few climbs.  Arapiles is a trad area, meaning that you have to place your own gear as you ascend.  I had brought lots of gear with me and Ant had his own so we had ample gear. 

Our first climb ended up being a 3 pitch (meaning more than one rope length) easy climb.  Australians grade things differently, in fact, I’ve spent my time here constantly not knowing what the temperature was, how far I’ve gone, or what the climbing grade is because Australians use Celsius, the metric system and their own grading system that begins at 18 or something like that.  I think that an 18 is around a 5.7 or so and a 24 is around an 11d or 12a, depending on the guidebook.  I didn’t climb anything harder than a 24 so I quit paying attention after that.

Our first climb was no more difficult than a 5.7.   It was super fun, solid, and ended on a thin arête to the top of a spire.  I of course didn’t bring my camera. 

The challenge it would seem at Arapiles is really in the descent.  This area is so traditional that they don’t put in any sort of rappel stations.  Instead, the descent required us to sling a rock, rappel, then fling the rope and the webbing it was attached to off the rock to retrieve it.  We then had to downclimb these class 5 chimneys to get back to the base of the cliff.  In other words, the downclimb was harder than the climb and we did it unroped.  Kinda weird.

Upon returning to the ground, we did another single pitch climb that I led.  It was really fun and also probably a 5.7 or so.  As with the first route, it also required a more difficult downclimb than the climb itself – downclimbing the back of the ridge with fairly significant exposure even though the climbing wasn’t hard.  Exposure is a way of saying that if you fall you probably go all the way down.

Anyway, we were running out of daylight and so we ended our first day after these two climbs. Ant showed me some of the bouldering areas around Arapiles and we took a brief tour of some of the other areas were we would hopefully climb on future days, including the area where we could test the portaledge.  

Boulder Problem -- I did all the moves on this one just not in one go.

View of what Arapiles looks like close up

There were lots of kangaroos wandering around as we headed back to camp.  They are very cute, though it did not dissuade me from eating kangaroo that night – roasted in a frying pan over a wood fire, medium rare.  Pretty tasty.

It is hard to get a good picture of a jumping kangaroo

We woke the next morning to dark clouds and imminent rain.  This necessitated a Plan D – instead of climbing today at Arapiles, we would drive to the Grampions, which is evidently a better place to climb in the rain.  The plan had been to climb a few days at the Grampions anyway, which Ant said was about an hour from our camp, so it wasn’t too much a deviation from our plan.

After a variety of errands and stuff in town, we embarked upon the drive quite late.  Given I had no idea where we were going or how long it was going to take to get there, I didn’t really have much input into this process.  To further make matters complex, there had been floods in the area the year before, some of the roads were closed and so we had to stop at a visitor’s center to get the beta on what might be open and what access existed to where.  They then provided us with directions to our trailhead, though Australians call them tracks, and we then drove towards our goal – across quite a few miles of dirt roads.

View of the Grampions National Park area

Grampions National Park

We finally reached the trailhead for the climbing area at about 3:00.  Given it got dark at 5:30, our day had turned into one of investigation, not climbing, we will call it Plan E. 

We began what Australians call “bushwalking” but what Americans call “hiking.”  When I had heard the term bushwalking, I had developed an image of walking through an area that looks something like Eastern Washington with lots of sagebrush and things that look like bushes. 

In Australia, bushwalking happens in a forest – which also means that “bushfires” are really “forest fires.”  I felt relatively enlightened once I figured this out and it changed my internal vision of what Australia looks like.  Mostly the trees are eucalyptus and I kept my eyes peeled for koalas, but I didn’t see any outside of the nature reserve we went to after the conference had finished.

For our bushwalk, we left the climbing gear in the car, walked past some kangaroos, and walked up the trail to engage in a bit of climber tourism – which is when you just look at rocks, you don’t climb them.

We actually didn’t make it all the way to the climbing area – but were back at the car before dark.  Given I still had visions of last year’s bivouac in Yosemite on my mind, I did not want to get lost in the woods and spend the night in the cold.  Besides, we still had to drive on untold miles of dirt roads infested with kangaroos before getting back to the tent.  As we drove out, there were kangaroos standing all over the road, at least the dirt parts of it.

It was raining by the time we got back to the tent and so dinner was cooked over a campstove in the rainfly of the k-mart tent.  It did make for an early night.

It rained all night and the next morning too.  We spent a good part of the morning constructing a tarp cover for the campsite so that we would not be tentbound.  This involved a tarp, strings, sticks, and rocks – also we had to move the fire ring.  

The stick system didn't work so well in the wind

Given it was still raining, we went into town to the public library where all the other climbers were also hanging out waiting for the rain to stop.  The weather report said it probably wasn’t going to stop any time soon. 

Time to prepare Plan F.

That evening, as it rained, we visited some campers who were camped not too far away.  They were folks who had climbed at Arapiles years ago and had just come up for a camping visit to see what it was like.  They had this giant space-pod tent thing, which looked really cool and they fed us banana bread.  One of the cool things about the dirtbag/tent life is that you live in the flow of other interesting people where you can hear their stories and talk about your different travels. People come and go, you hang out around campfires and talk about climbing and stuff, people play music, there are the inevitable slacklines around, and lots of climbing during the day.  That night we talked about the great polar expeditions, Australian politics, and their work.  They were really nice guys.

It rained the whole time.

It was still raining the next morning when we decided that we would deploy Plan F and head for a different climbing area.  It is always a hard balance – the rain could stop and then there would be excellent climbing, but at the same time, how much time do you want to spend waiting for the rain to stop?  It isn’t really an existential question, but it is one that is continuously asked by those who want to be outside in non-rainy conditions.

At one level, leaving now was not too far off the original plan, which was to make our way down to Sydney anyway.  Based upon this earlier plan, I had booked my return flight from Sydney instead of Melbourne and so at some point, I needed to get that direction anyway.  We packed up our stuff, though Ant left most of his in his camp, assuring me that this was normal for Arapiles even though he was going to be gone for two weeks or so.  I should note that the pink princess pillow came along. 

We then made for a sport climbing area that was much closer to Sydney.  I’m not sure if it confirmed that our choice was a good one, but it did rain most of the way there.