Proud supporter of two minute noodles: Day 1: Cape to Cape Hiking Trail

The Cape to Cape trail has been on my bucket list since 2009 when I cycled across Australia. For some reason or another I managed to do the Bibbulmun track, Larapinta and Annapurna trail all before I did the Cape to Cape, a hiking trail located ~3 hours away from Perth and only 5 days long. After 3 long weeks of finals I was more than keen to get out of the big smoke and have some time to relax and unwind, I thought, what better way to do so than to walk the Cape to Cape. With a plethora of hiking gear in my hiking cupboard, I quickly packed my bags, bought some food and left on a whim, I may or may not have left some crucial things behind, but before I left I quickly grabbed a guidebook I bought for the trail 3 years earlier.

Arriving in Dunsborough I came across my first oversight, leavers. Kids were running wild on the streets and it was still daytime, remembering the mischeif I caused in my younger years, I was a little aprehensive as to where I could safely leave my car for 5 days so I approached the information centre with my little dillema. Fortunately they informed me that the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse provides a free service for Cape to Cape hikers in which you can park your car outside of public access areas. Perfect!

Day 1 - Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse to Bushcamp ~28km

I started the walk with an open mindset, no deadline, no set distance per day, just take it as it comes. The option to walk the track both ways was on the back of the mind, but we'd see how we go. I started the trail at 11am and Day 1 was brutal. Brutal because I was so damn unfit, I had barely seen the sun these past three weeks, being outside and carrying a heavy pack with 4 days worth of food, with additional water for a dry camp, I walked 7 hours trying to make the Moses campsite located 34km from the start, but by around 25km my legs and shoulders were in much pain and the sun was starting to set. I needed to find a place to camp pronto.

A lot of the track follows old access routes and 4wd tracks. Its an unwritten rule, but on the Cape to Cape you are allowed to camp anywhere along the track, provided you are well away from vehicle access. In this case I was smack bang in the middle of a 4WD track so there was no getting around it, I had to keep walking. Eventually, my standards for my ideal campsite kept going down and down and I ended up camping on some kind of ad-hoc turn-around point for drivers. Good enough for me I thought. I plopped my bag down and started unpacking, I brought along a little poncho tarp as my shelter, and a length of rope to tie it down. I cut the rope into 4 even sections then started setting it all up before I realised I had forgotton to bring pegs. Shit.

No biggie, I walked the whole larapinta trail with pegs but didn't use them once since you could get the pegs no deeper than 2cm in the ground. I had mastered using rocks as my pegs. Just had to find a couple of rocks. I found two, and rigged everything else onto the nearby shrub. `Meh, good enough for me', I thought. It wasn't until I had set up camp that I started to notice a nasty smell, one that I had smelt many times before whilst cycle touring. The smell of a dead Kangaroo. Shit. I couldn't find it, but every once in a while when the wind was blowing the wrong way I would get a nice waft of dead kangaroo. Perfect. What followed was even worse. After cooking a mediocre undercooked, crunchy, mac-and-cheese I layed down to go to sleep. My first mistake was not bringing any pegs, my next mistake was not bringing a mosquito net. Never in my life had I encountered so many mosquitoes, never in my life had I wished for amazon to bring me a bottle of deet with their drone techonology, never will I forget this night.

The only course of action was to wrap myself in my sleeping bag and to put it right over my head. The only problem with this however was that I had a -7 degree bag, and that it was 7pm, I was hoping to read a book or something before I fell asleep. It was a long, sweaty night.

Day 2 here