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.