My shorts are caked in all manner of dirt and slime from the slippery tree trunks, and I curse myself for not putting on a pair of trekking trousers. At least they would have protected me a bit instead of letting all the branches and thorns tear at me, scratching my shins with uninhibited abandon.
Gaiters dead weight? Yeah, right.
Well well, Jyrki happens to like the suggestion of a break, too — a change of clothes and a few apricots, although apparently we have to save our muesli bars for the top of ridge once we reach the majestic altitude of nine hundred metres. I pull on my trekking trousers at the edge of the path, at times balancing on one leg. I have to take my boots off because they won’t fit through the trouser legs. Besides, even if the trousers had had some ingenious zip system to help you push your boots down the legs without taking them off, you’d be mad to shove clumps of wet humus through the insides of your trousers. Meanwhile Jyrki takes a look at his hiking pole.
‘Fucking, fucking fuck.’
Well, that certainly comes right from the heart. I turn to look at him. The tip of his telescopic trekking pole is missing.
‘Fucking cock-sucking arsewipe. I wondered why the terrain seemed so fucking wonky on one side.’
The mud has swallowed up the entire lower section of the pole; the sludge has won the tug-of-war, at the same time scoring a resounding victory over the Komperdell spring mechanism.
I’ve never heard Jyrki swear so much. He unscrews the remaining telescope section of the pole as far out as it will go, so that it will be of at least some use alongside its intact partner. The severed pole looks weirdly crippled, and because the broken end is open like a pipe you can expect it to take a neat mud sample every time it sinks into the ground.
‘Fucking useless piece of shit.’
‘You shouldn’t get too attached to inanimate objects,’ I comment, poker faced, with a knowing nod of the head.
Jyrki
Once we move above the treeline we find ourselves in the clouds, completely enveloped in mist. Visibility is only a couple of metres. Once the forest disappears it is swiftly replaced with boggy marshlands. There must be some directive to protect sensitive alpine plants and vegetation, as the path continues in steps along a series of duckboards, all the while moving in a steep incline.
It’s almost a relief. At least on these steps you can sit down for a moment, take a good gulp of water and unwrap a muesli bar.
The air has been damp throughout this leg. Now the water is starting to condense into droplets on my arms and in my hair. It's only once you stop for a minute that you realize how cold it is. Out here, climbing up to eight hundred metres has the same effect as climbing two thousand in the Alps. I have to put my jacket on straight away.
When there are no trees there’s nothing to hold back the wind. It comes right in across the sea. This high up you get a real sense of its ferocity, biting and penetrating. The strongest gusts can make you stagger to maintain your balance.
The wind isn’t just wind. It’s cutting. It howls and gnaws.
Never was suncream as pointless as today.
I try to chew the muesli bar, but my mouth is almost too dry. I wonder what’s wrong with my eyes. Why does the surrounding mist suddenly seem so stripy? Then it dawns on me: it’s raining harder now, and the water is coming down as sleet. Horizontally. Or snow. Or hail. In its solid form, the water strikes my cheek facing towards the sea with such force that a moment later the flesh is tingling and sore.
I look at my hiking poles, particularly the crippled one, and it pisses me off so much it hurts.
I pull up the hood on my hiking jacket and stuff the muesli-bar wrapper into my pocket. I grab my poles and stand up.
‘The path won’t walk itself,’ I tell her.
Heidi
As I sit down on a duckboard step I see that the stitching in the seam of one of my trouser legs has come apart. It’s gaping open almost right up to the knee.
‘Tasmania ruins everything.’
‘What?’ Jyrki is already on his feet, gazing up ahead of us as if he could actually see anything in this weather.
It's an irony of almost cosmic proportions that Ironbound, supposedly the breathtaking highpoint in the panoramas along the whole of South Coast Track, is completely shrouded by the cloud cover, with whirling snow hurtling into our faces more convincingly than Finnish storms in March ever do nowadays on the other side of the planet.
It occurs to me that, in addition to the mud, the water and snow now have free access to the mouth of one of my boots.
And when I stand up I realize that it’s all in there already and has been for a while, that the heat of my body movement has prevented me from noticing that my boot is full of water.
Jyrki looks at my trouser leg and shows me one of his hiking poles. There’s something silvery grey wrapped around the middle.
‘There’s a couple of metres of duct tape on here. You can fix it with that.'
But the idea of taking my trousers off in this blizzard seems impossible, and I say so.
Jyrki shrugs his shoulders. My unstitched trouser leg billows like a sail with every step I take.
Jyrki
You could almost imagine a small dinosaur peering out from behind a rock at any moment.
Ironbound’s western face is virtually the Garden of Eden. The path winds its way along the edge of a ravine so deep that you can’t see the bottom through the mist. Just over a metre wide, this shelf of rock is home to a gushing profusion of all different shades of green, buds and shoots in red, lilac, yellow, the orange of pine needles. The dampness and the mist in the background make the colours seem even deeper and more exuberant. Battered by the wind, the flora here is close to the ground, but it is incredibly diverse and comes in forms I’ve never seen before. Perhaps this is what the world looked like some time back in the Mesozoic era. In its sheer colourfulness and strangeness, this is another Tasmania altogether; it couldn’t be more different from the almost savannah-like yellowy-green landscapes of the plains, the eucalyptus groves, the bushes and the scrub. Up here enormous boulders balance precariously on the edge of the cliff; sheer drops and promontories follow one after the other. Everywhere you look you can see that 18,000 years ago the land was covered with a continental ice sheet.
A primordial forest hanging on the edge of bottomless gorges, set right in the middle of a giants’ game of skittles. Now I understand why Southy is cut the way it is.
As we descend further down the western face and the path begins to veer to the north-east, the flora thins out in stages. Soon the wall is almost nothing but rock. There is nothing to remind us of the suffocating black, damp forest of the eastern face. Now there are only long-suffering clumps of grass and every now and then a small stunted bush, ravaged by the wind, barely the height of a dwarf birch.
The sleet begins to relent, and the covering of clouds breaks in places. The glow of the sun can be seen as a pale moon-like disk behind the layer of clouds. After a moment I catch a glimpse of the sea looming to our left.
Christ alive.
We’ve crossed Ironbound.
Heidi
It would have been a damned sight easier to come up this ridge than to go down it, and now I understand why there are so many people coming from the opposite direction and so few going the same way as us.
Who would have thought I’d end up actually missing the tree roots we had seen on the way up, the branches and the stone steps as high as your waist? This fresh nightmare, which we might jokingly call the descent path, is nothing more than a strip of gravel, worn away and slightly lighter than the rest of the cliff, running down the steep hillside that we’re supposed to use to get back down without loose stones slipping beneath the soles of our feet or the weight of our rucksacks throwing us on to our backs. Our trekking poles are pretty useless, too — the only way to move forwards is to take small steps with the sides of your boots, like a first-time skier on an almost vertical expanse of snow.
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My boot goes slosh. I can feel the muddy water churning inside my sock and between my toes. The other boot is probably full of all kinds of things, too, but at least it’s drier.
The path of the Louisa River can be seen down below — not the actual river itself, of course, but the mass of thick vegetation that follows all the waterways around here. And I can see the start of tomorrow’s leg: the undulating, yellowy-green plains which extend as far as the eye can see. Once we reach flatter ground it looks like it’s only a stone’s throw to the camp at Louisa River.
Thank God.
I suppose this must make me an ‘experienced hiker’. That's the yardstick Jyrki had used before we came out here.
Is that how it happens, in just a few days? Is walking a certain number of kilometres sufficient to make you experienced, although there will be some sorts of terrain you’ve never hiked through? If you’ve spent ten years trekking through the backwoods of Lapland, does that make you an ‘experienced hiker’ in the Dolomites? Or vice versa? Or does ‘experience’ mean that you’ve learnt to appreciate certain theoretical rules of play (Jyrki’s rules, that is, from which, in his vast experience, he often strays because a sufficient understanding of the rules naturally gives you the freedom to break them) from which you wouldn’t dream of deviating: never leave the marked route or try to take a shortcut; be realistic about how much ground you can cover in a day’s leg, and leave yourself plenty of time; drink lots of fluids; eat enough; learn to read a map and use a compass; learn the basics of first aid; learn to read the weather.
Is experience the fact that I've now picked up the masculine habit of hacking up the saliva in my mouth and spitting it at the side of the path, a habit that has become so routine I’m afraid I won’t even notice I’m doing it once I’m back in the city?
I’m beginning to understand. My experience is in my toughened calf muscles and my breathing, which flows better with every day’s walking. Without Kepler and Nelson Lakes — as piss-easy as Jyrki claimed they were — I would never have been able to cross Ironbound.
No matter how much I’d thought of Daddy Dearest.
Had I, in some unfathomable way, been given back my freedom after all?
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
AUSTRALIA
Grampians National Park, Hall’s Gap
March 2007
Jyrki
We were sitting with Bill on the terrace of Tim’s Place drinking God-awful canned Fosters. We’d got off the bus from Adelaide and jumped on Bill’s minibus. Bill’s company ran nature and sightseeing trips lasting a few days at a time, and they were also a handy way of getting from place to place. The next day his minibus would take us to the western end of the Great Ocean Walk. That was to be our first leg since arriving in Australia. Further inland it was still far too hot and dry to think about going on any of the bush walks. Along the coast it would be cooler, and we would be more certain of a regular water supply.
All the guidebooks had sung the praises of the Great Ocean Walk. It was one of the newer and most breathtaking of the average-length treks in mainland Australia, over ninety kilometres of national park coastal panoramas. The route featured climbs, dunes, caves and a few small villages that were worth seeing in their own right.
Here in the pass at Hall’s Gap the night was pitch black.
By the time we had arrived in the forests of the Grampians it was already dark. Bill told us to look out of the windows for wallabies illuminated in the bus’s headlights. He gave his passengers instructions. If you see a wallaby on the left, you shout out ‘LeftíIf you see one on the right, shout ‘Rightl’ What if we see one straight ahead?’ someone asked. Apparently then you shout ‘Oh shit!
We’d bought food and drink on the way. Bill had told us that none of the restaurants in Hall’s Gap would be open by the time we arrived. In any case, he said, there were far fewer than there used to be. It didn’t matter: the backpackers’ hostel had the usual shared kitchen.
The other minibus passengers had already hit the sack, but we had stayed up sipping our lagers. Bill had sat down to join us. A thick candle flickering in the breeze lit our table.
Bill was in his fifties, and he clearly had the gift of the gab. He was just telling us about how he had dealt with a couple who had started getting down to business on the back seat of his minibus (accelerating then braking until the couple fell off the seat and took the hint) when the night was pierced with a high-pitched, electronic noise.
Bill groaned and fished in the pocket of his khakis for his mobile phone, the screen of which gave off a ghostly phosphorescent glow. I was surprised when he handed it to me. He asked me to read the text message he had just received — he had left his glasses inside somewhere. I took the phone and told him the message was from someone called Lisa. Bill nodded. I pressed the button to bring up the text. I looked at it, then at Bill, then back at the message. My voice went hoarse as I read it out.
Bill pressed his hands against his eyes, just for a moment, then took them away, caught his breath, and all of a sudden the wrinkles beneath his eyes and around the edges of his mouth seemed deeper than before.
In 2006, a year ago, starting on 20 January, the Grampians had caught fire and burnt for two weeks solid. The diameter of the affected area was 360 kilometres.
It was hard to comprehend, until you realized that back home it would have meant the whole of southern Finland being ablaze right the way up to Jyväskylä and beyond.
Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest had been destroyed, but, as if by a miracle, only two people had died, a father and son who had been trapped in their car by the flames. Around 60,000 sheep had perished. Nobody had bothered counting the wallabies.
It was no wonder that the flourishing tourist trade in Hall’s Gap had started to fall apart.
And now Otway was on fire.
Otway was on fire, villages had already been evacuated, and Bill had no choice but to choose an alternative route.
The Great Ocean Walk would be closed off to us.
We were supposed to see koalas there, wild koalas living in trees.
I clenched my fists.
Although I’d known all of this beforehand.
How the soil was impoverished, how the hooves and trotters that this land should never have known trampled the soil, making it lifeless and barren. How the small furry animals tilling the land in search of food ended up in the mouths of rats and foxes artificially introduced into the country’s ecosystem. How the ancient forests were decimated to such an extent that there were no great fire-resistant trees left, leaving fragile new growth all the more vulnerable to every spark.
That’s how Australia will blaze.
That’s how the world will be burnt.
She asked me what we should do now. I told her we were in the wrong part of the continent to bother with Bibbulmun Track. Of its impressive 900-kilometre stretch, there were a couple of hundred kilometres that ran along the coastline, which meant, theoretically, it would have been suitable for us given the time of year. But because Bibbulmun was a long way from the southwestern corner of Australia for the time being we were through with mainland Australia.
It was just a question of distance. We could take Bill’s minibus as far as Melbourne, jump on the Spirit of Tasmania ferry and chug all the way to Devonport.
It was time to go, a little ahead of schedule, to Tasmania and the Overland Track.
Heidi
The landscape was incredible, a surreal mixture of black and green, so bright that it hurt the eyes.
Fresh shoots seemed to burst forth from the blackened, truncated stumps of the eucalyptus trees. The clumps of grass stood out so vividly against the pitch-black ground
that they looked as though they had been lit up from the inside.
‘There are some species sprouting here that have never been seen before round these parts. Some seeds apparently need the heat of a fire before they’re able to germinate.’
Bill had driven through die Grampians a few days after they had finally managed to put the fire out.
‘Imagine,’ he said, his voice low, and I didn’t know whether it was with anger or admiration, ‘imagine this landscape, reaching out as far as the eye can see, and not a colour in sight. Nothing. It was as if you’d just taken a car and driven into a black-and-white film. All around you, nothing but black and grey. Residual smoke even blocked out the colour of the sky.’ Bill coughed. ‘Some of the eucalyptus trees were so old they didn’t catch fire at first, but they have a habit of going hollow in the middle. The living part of the tree is just a thin layer beneath the bark. It was only a matter of time before the fire was sucked into their rotten insides and shot upwards. The upper branches were destroyed, but the trunks survived. The trees were like factory chimneys, black and sturdy, and you could see gloomy dark-grey smoke billowing out of their tops long after the fire itself had been put out. And there were thousands of those chimneys, thousands of them, stretching from here right to the horizon.’ Silence descended for a moment, as now we could envisage it and understand why this forest was so low and stunted.
‘What was the name of that bloke? The European guy that used to draw pictures of hell?’
‘Gustave Doré?’ I suggested.