Larapinta Trail: the preparation
Jun 15
Upon waking in the Aurora Hotel in Alice Springs after a restless nights sleep I knew it was time to get down to the business end of starting my “Continental Divide Trail (CDT) training exercise”. A lazy 231km stroll in the wilds of central Australia along the McDonnell Ranges to get me used to some hills and the odd mountain or two. Nothing too taxing just a good way to spend a few days off. You know the spiel, getting back to nature, harvesting your inner Zen and resetting the mental anguish clock, Blah! Blah! Blah!
Right, first thing, nothing gets done without a hearty bacon and egg burger and my morning coffee. So I stroll over to the Stump café at the Diplomat Hotel. This is a favourite of mine because it’s just plain simple wholistic food designed to keep the Alice tourist army marching and it does a half decent coffee as well. Day dreaming a little whilst savouring my coffee I pause on what needed to be done.
Previously we had arranged for food drops and transfers for the Larapinta Trail (LT) with a local company called Larapinta Trek Trail Support . Now there are a multitude of companies in Alice Springs that provide transfers to and from the Trailheads on the LT. I’m not going to try and vouch for the positive and negatives of each company, but I will say this, the team at LTTS know their proverbial shit, they provided us with nothing but exceptional services throughout the whole preparation of the trip and were accommodating to our needs. They knew from the start of the process we were locals working in a remote community with no mobile coverage and dodgy internet. But this didn’t seem to faze them. In summary they are good operators, no they aren’t providing me with any remuneration for this wrap. I just felt the need to acknowledge their efforts and thank them on a job well done. I’ve worked in tourism for a good part of my working life, and I know it can be a thankless and demanding job with clients that have somewhat unrealistic expectations. In fact, when they sent out a generic text message saying that one needs to adjust the expectations of the LTTS services whilst on the trail I just laughed because I knew high maintenance clients had necessitated the need for this by asking LTTS to bring them out forgotten equipment or replace broken things at their whim, much like my clients with cries for service of non-emergencies in the dead of night.
I digress (it’s the Meanderthal way after all), breakfast sorted and its back to the motel room to meet up with my trail buddy Maura (Irish) to pack our boxes and bags. What probably should have only taken a couple of hours took near on all day. It’s kind of hard to work out what one is going to be eating for the next 18 days. it’s not like you can call up Uber Eats or Woolies and get a delivery to the nearest trail head. Although that’s exactly what we did but more on that later, I won’t ruin the surprise. This should have been the first red flag in my preparation because I couldn’t definitively say we’d be here or there on any given day. I’m more of a fly by the seat of your pants kind of guy when it comes to travel. I just had a rough idea we’d be covering 15km per day and had 18 days to do it in. On the flip side of that I’m also a very conscious safety person when it comes to the harshness of outback Australia, so I was packing safety gear, equipment spares and making plans B, C and D contingencies to go up my sleeve.
Only about 18kgs of hurt to hump
The majority of the time spent during my preparations was devising 24 hr ration packs of trail food. By the end of it if I saw another M&M, muesli bar or packet of mixed nuts it would have been too bloody soon. Okay, okay, I confess I made a rookie error folks I did a typical bloke thing and bought pretty much the same thing for 18 days. If I had the benefit of hindsight I would have made sure to pack a variety of different styles of food because food flavour fatigue (I had heard of this fancy phrase and dismissed it as waffle) is real and bugger me I was regretting my choice of muesli bar and dehydrated meals by the end of it. Ooh and don’t forget the water - a flavour like Tang powder or Powerade goes a long way to making yummy chlorinated twang or treated water that much more palatable. I wonder if they make powders that taste like beer, scotch or a lovely light Merlot, now there’s a marketing idea, I think I’m going to patent that- watch this space.
The Rat pack 24 hrs of goodness weighing in at 1kg, I can’t even look at this stuff now without my taste buds going into riot mode, but its calories and it did the job.
Okay, I can hear the cogs turning for my hiking buddies, for those that are interested, on Day One we hauled 6L of water each and five days worth of food. The temperature in central Australia was pretty mild (mid 20 degrees C), we’d had recent rains but ground water was scarce in this 17km section so it necessitated that volume, later we trimmed it down because we started finding water as we went but I was always conscious not to bet the house on it despite what people say
