The bushwalking season in the Snowy Mountains ended this weekend (at least I am declaring it over anyway). Graham and I were intending to do the Roiund Mountain - Mount Jagungal loop with a side trip to Grey Mare Hut. The side trip was quite ambitious considering it would have meant walking about 25 km on the first day.

We made it to Derschkos Hut and then the weather began to close in. We stayed the night as the wind increased and the temperature dropped. The weather was too bad for camping and so we decided to return to the car. It was a four hour walk and so we only had until lunch time for the weather to clear, in order that we could make it back to the car before dark. The weather didn’t clear, and the snow began to fall.

We spent a second night in Derschkos Hut and managed to read every bit of paper in the place. The wind died down overnight, and the temperature dropped to -8C, but without the wind, it wasn’t that bad. The next morning the wind had gone, it was still -2C and very overcast.

We set out for the car, making a quick detour to Round Mountain Hut for lunch. The temperature stayed below zero for most of the walk, which was good, since the snow remained powdery and dry. The sun came out for a few minutes just before we got back to the car, but didn’t stay long. We drove home and it took a good 30km before all of the snow has blown off the roof.

A fun time was had by all.

Here are some more pics.

It is my sad duty to inform the world that after travelling 27,740km around the globe, the furry travel bug called “Robeart Actually” is officially missing in action. The bear began its journey in New South Wales on 26 February 2003 with the destination of Switzerland. It has since travelled to New Zealand, Queensland, Singapore, California, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

The highlight of the trip was being photographed outside Graceland, but this would be one of the last times we would hear from Robeart. He was picked up alongside a highway in Tennessee in July 2006 and has not been seen or heard from since. The map below shows the bear’s journey.

On a happier note, my other travel bug, “Horse with No Name”, continues its journey around the world.

It is currently in Denmark having traveled 22,973km.

It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, and much like hitting your head against a brick wall, an Outward Bound course feels good when you stop.

Over the course of nine days a group of eight particpants and two instructors navigated by land feature and compass bearing through open forest, farmland and thick tropical rainforest. Carrying old style rations (mostly tins and heavy fresh fruit and vegetables)and all of our water for each day, the going was tough in places and it was meant to be.
The story goes that Outward Bound was founded by Kurt Hahn who wondered why so many fit young merchant seaman were dying in lifeboats in 1941, whilst their older colleagues were surviving. He determined that the young sailors had not experienced enough hardship and set about establishing courses to introduce them to hardship and toughen them up.
So the course is meant to push people outside of their comfort zone and has a lot of hardship for hardship sake. For example, when navigating, we were forced to go directly across country when the destination was accessible by walking along the road.

Among the challenges were abseiling 35m out of a tree, climbing a large swinging ladder while connected to your partner, paddling the length of Toonumbar Dam, performing community service and spending 24 hours alone in the bush.
We also played some of those silly games you play in those corporate development courses. I say ’silly’ because the games themselves are ’silly’ by design. It is how the game is debriefed that the power of the game shines through. Unfortunately we were let down in this respect. There was no real debreifing model that was followed and as a result people merely talked about what they did, not how they felt when they were doing it, the other times in life they feel the same way and how they might do things differently in future. As a result the level of personal development within the group was nowhere near what it could have been and that was disappointing. Read the rest of this entry »

The last thing you expect to find at the end of a 35km long dead end road is a magnificent hotel, but this is exactly what you get at Glen Davis. Essentially a ghost town, compared to its heyday when it had 2500 residents, Glen Davis operated as a shale oil town with the major refinery operations occurring from the 1930s to the 1950s. The Glen Davis Hotel was built to service the town and gave visiting government official somewhere nice to stay. The structure is such that it was built to serve the town a very long town, however the town died and the hotel died with it.

Bought in a completely derelict state, covered in graffiti and containing several dead animals, the hotel has been wonderfully restored by Adam and Alison who are the owners of the hotel and among the friendliest hosts you will ever meet.

The valley in which the hotel sits is said to be the second biggest canyon in the world and wherever you are around the hotel, you cannot escape views of the magnificent escarpment. History buffs can take a very entertaining and informative tour of the old shale oil refinery and mine, ending on a hill commanding views of the valleys, the ruins and the town.

If you want a relaxing weekend in a quiet yet spectacular atmosphere you can’t go past the Glen Davis Hotel. (No, you literally cannot go past it, it’s at the end of the road). This might sound a bit like an advert, but I really enjoyed my stay and think everyone should know about this place.

More pics of the area.

It is briefly Thursday. Soon after the plane takes off we will cross the International Date Line and it will be Friday. I will savour the delights of Thursday while they last.

LAN were unable to check our bags through to Sydney as the French wanted a chance to check our bag in Tahiti. Also flights to Tahiti from South America aren’t subject to the new ‘not allowed to hijack a plane with a bottle of shampoo’ rule. This does apply for flights in and out of Australia. The irony of the terrorism prevention measures in Tahiti, is that the French Government has a long history of supporting terrorism. It was somewhere in French Polynesia that the French Government terrorists responsible for bombing the Rainbow Warrior were sent to work on their tan for a few years in the guise of a ‘gaol sentence’.

Anyway, as a result of all this security palaver, we have had to line up, go through immigration and customs, collect our bags and do it all in reverse 50m down the concourse. We were in the country for less than 30 minutes. That is my shortest stay in any country. The airport hasn’t caught up with the trend in most of the civilised world and still allows smoking in its terminal, and not just in a tar stained glass booth with powerful air conditioning. It is permitted everywhere and those French cigarettes with the smell of slowly burning Parisian dog shit seem to be the order of the day. Or is that the ‘odour of the day’.

If the French disappeared off the face of the earth, would anyone really care or indeed notice? Certainly getting them out of the Pacific would be a start, although that might mean having to test nuclear devices a little closer to home.

Sue has gone to see if we can get into the ‘Club Lounge’ since she is in the Qantas Club and the flight is code shared with Qantas. Unfortunately on these code-shared flights only business class passengers are allowed in the lounge. Pricks!

This is our second last airport of the trip. The last of course being Sydney, where we look forward to being abused by the taxi driver for the crime of living too close to the airport. We shall see.

We are sitting in the hotel’s breakfast room finishing off a bottle of vino blanco while an interview is being filmed next to us. I have no idea what it is about or who is being interviewed, but we haven’t been asked to move and are sitting only just out of shot.

Today was very quiet. We slept in late again and then went for a walk around town. We stopped at the Internet café where I discovered both the caches I had missed had been found in the last six days.

Sort of hiring a car there was no way to get back to the volcano, so we went back to the cache near the cemetery. Armed with new knowledge that it was a micro cache, we found it easily, but I had forgotten the travel bug. Although there was no way to fit a 10cm long plastic bull inside a micro cache, I left it under the boulder in which the cache was hidden. Having brought it half way around the world, I wasn’t going to take it back.

The rest of the day was spent eating lunch, not too much as our Pesos were running out and the islands only ATM only took MasterCard. It is only 45 minutes until our transfer to the airport arrives. It is 1815 and we will be travelling until 1500 tomorrow (0700 Sydney time). That is a lot of time in the air and not a lot of fun.

As I write these words in my diary, it is dawning on me that my holiday is almost over.

Today is Day 4 of the 5 day tour and is a “day at leisure”. The sea is too rough to go diving, hiring a car would see us driving to places we have already been and we have visited at least ¾ of the shops in the village. There is not a lot to do but sit around in the sun/shade and read. This is very relaxing but has an underlying feeling of constriction.

Day 5 of the tour is ‘Depart Easter Island’, but since the flight is at 2130 (pickup at 1900), it is another free day. I still have 400 pages of a new book to finish but Sue is down to 200 or less on hers. Although there are a wide variety of stone statues for sale in the shops and the local supermarket has such obscure items as Bart Simpson masks and Spiderman costumes, books seem few and far between. The only available ones are about Easter Island. The next 36 hours could prove to be excruciatingly slow.

Today we have two half day tours with the two remaining Australians. There was a three hour break in the middle. We visited more huas and the ceremonial village of Orongo. It was just near here that I failed to find my second cache on Easter Island. Ground zero was an opening under a pile of rocks, but the cache was not to be found. The travel bug will now have to returned to Australia. Shame. So many near misses.During the 3 hour break we tried to change our flight to an earlier one, only to find that the flight we are on is the next west bound flight.

At sunset we went to the nearby hua to take photos of the sun setting behind the Maoi, but the cloud conspired to block most of the light.

We had a simple meal before going to bed.

Today we had a tour a tour with the six other Australians. Every site seeing spot involved stone statues in one form or another. We began at the sparse but interesting anthropology museum to learn all about the Rapa Nui people and the main periods in their history. (Before the Maoi, building the Maoi, smashing the Maoi).

We went to the quarry where the statues were shaped before they were moved into their final locations. (There are over 800 on the island). We saw the biggest Maoi yet formed (over 200 tonnes, but not completely cut out of the quarry).

We then went to several sites where the Maoi were erected. There have been restored as most were toppled during the “smash the Maoi” period of history. We have another full day tour tomorrow (with a pack lunch) and hopefully the opportunity to find the other Easter Island cache. It will be the last opportunity to dispose of the ‘travel bug’ before we go home. The duty free Absolut Citron is helping the assimilation process.

The flight to Easter Island was great because it was on a 767-300 refitted with a new entertainment system. It had both video and audio on demand with a choice of over 70 movies and TV shows and 300 CDs. There were also video games.

At Easter Island our bags were almost the last on the carousel and we feared that they may not have made it on to the plane. We shared our transfer with six other Australians, although they were staying at a different hotel.

We had a few hours sleep to catch up on that lost on the plane, before going for a short walk around Hanga Roa (the capital and only real town). We searched unsuccessfully for a cache and suspect it may have been discovered by a local.