Next Few Weeks, Gear and Packing

June in the NT
I wanted to get some words down here before the adventure actually begins, and outline what the next few weeks looks like for those following along at home. In short what is lined up is:

• 2 weeks walking the Larapinta Trail
• 5 day road trip from Alice Springs to Uluṟu, Kata Tjuṯa 
• 4 days driving from Alice Springs to Katherine 
• 1 week walking the Jatbula Trail 

Larapinta Trail 
Today I’m flying to Mparntwe / Alice Springs, and tomorrow I start walking the Larapinta Trail. Starting in Mparntwe / Alice Springs It’s 220km of track through Tjoritja / West MacDonnell National Park. I’m walking with my friends Hugh (flying with me from Sydney) and Georgia (lives in Mparntwe), our plan is to go end to end in 15 days, which includes a short little side trip off the Larapinta trail for one night to Summit Mt Giles.

We are independently walking the trail, which means we are carrying all our own gear, tents, clothes, food etc. 14 days is too much food to carry in one go, so there are two food drops that we have arranged, where the food we have prepared will be waiting for us in a storage box at a campsites about one-third and two-thirds of the way into the walk. 

Gear and Prep
Any of you that know me know that when it comes to hiking equipment, I am a bit of a gear head. I enjoy the process of researching and reading reviews and selecting the piece of equipment that best suits your needs. Planning for this trip has been no exception, I have slowly tinkered away at my kit and have arrived at something I am pretty happy with. I will gladly do a post at a later point running through what I have got.

A part of the trip preparation that has been a little bit less fun has been organising the food. Mainly that there has just been so much of it to organise. When you're multi-day hiking, every gram of weight counts, so you need to work out every single meal and snack that you are going to be eating ahead of time. Doing this up front for two weeks requires a significant amount of planning.

The planning starts with building up a bit of a menu on paper, generally I found this step fun. Breakfast and lunch is going to be the same thing each day (porridge for brekky, wraps for lunch), and dinners is the chance to get a bit more creative. For 14 nights, my plan has been to have every meal twice, and so come up with 7 meals. Hugh, Georgia and I formed a bit of a pact where we were going to steer clear of the pre-made, pick off the shelf dehydrated meals, and make our own meals using food dehydrators each of us owned. Once a menu was set, things started to get a little tedious. Two whole weeks of food (3 meals + snacks per day) is a big shop, I reckon I was at Coles for over an hour checking things off the list.

From here each meal needs to be cooked and then put into the dehydrator. In my experience, with my dehydrator, drying out an entire meal such as a curry or a chilli takes a couple of days each (never the 8 - 12 hours that is often suggested online).

Another part of this that doesn't always translate from the menu on paper to the real world is that meal prepping for a hike does not exist in a vacuum. When you add in a very healthy amount of social activities in the guise of "farewells", wrapping things up and doing handover at work for the rest of the year, and a firm deadline of a flight to catch first thing Saturday morning, then you start to second guess the pact you've made and wonder if just buying the ready made hiking meals might have been the better option.

Stocktake
With all the above said, as I write this I am sitting on the plane to Mparntwe / Alice Springs:

• I did wrap everything up at work (could have done a bit of a better job of this sorry work peeps!)
• I feel like I was very well sent off with the amount of people I got to see in the past week
• My bag is all packed, complete with a few bits of shiny new kit, and;
• Every meal I've brought is my own dehydrated cooking - success! (Big thanks to Mum, Brad and Bella for the last minute zip-lock bag production line that was assembled last night to get all the food sorted and tidied up.)

Blog Manifesto
It feels to me that instagram has a bit of a strangle hold on travel content sharing which I am not entirely satisfied with. I’ve definitely been on trips before, looking at something amazing and then catch myself thinking ‘how can I capture this to look best on a instagram story’. For me, this cheapens the thing I am looking at as it starts to commodify or content-ise something that should otherwise just be a nice thing to look at. 

Undoubtedly however, I like to and still want to share my travel experiences in some form (hello Nans + Pop if you’re reading!) Where instagram is good is that everyone is on there, and so it’s an easy way to do that sharing, and there are tools in the app that make it very easy for people to engage with what you’ve written. 

And so we arrive at the blog/newsletter format and consider if that is the vessel for travel sharing: 

• I like that it’s a slightly slower format, it’ll arrive in your inbox and stay on this website for anyone to have a read of at their own pace. 
• I like that photos will look better and display bigger (taking more photos is something I am excited to do on this trip).
• I like that it will be a time capsule of posts that I can come back to

The most tricky thing about the blog is the writing. I think I like the idea of writing more than the actual writing itself. Writing something longer than an instagram caption feels vulnerable and a little bit cringe (I’m still figuring out if the name of this blog is too cringe). Despite this, I think I am going to have a go at the blog. I can guarantee I will at the very least post lots of photos with very simple text updates, and if I can work through the vulnerability/cringe then you might read some more in depth updates, reflections, musings etc.

That’ll do for now, I’ll check back in in a couple of weeks once we’ve finished the Larapinta!