Adventure

There is a certain freedom that comes with camping.

You carry everything that you need on your back, and it puts such a heavy load on you. You keep moving, one step at a time, moving even so closer to your destination.

Then you reach it, and you set up the tent and it becomes your home, your sanctuary for the next few days. Up the mountains, no one can reach you. All the trappings of the modern society can’t touch you. Your phone becomes a heavy paperweight. There are no need for words beyond the simple verbs and nouns.

And up in the mountains, you realise what are the truly important. The people dear to you, the matters you care about, they come to you in the dead silence that is the wilderness.

You have never truly experienced silence until you’ve been to a place where the nearest hint of civilisation is about 4 hours away. The silence and darkness at night is something that presses you down, immobilising you. There is nothing like that I’ve ever experienced before.

And I quite enjoy it, to be honest. The absolute silence and darkness, the closeness to nature, all the time for you to cleanse your mind and soul.

And then waking up to a landscape of snow-covered vegetation when you slept to a sea of green, it’s impossible to describe how it feels.

I’ve been up to Walls of Jerusalem in Tasmania, slept in a tent up there for three nights, walked over thirty kilometers, endured the cold, cold weather of the night, peered at the faraway mountains, looked up from below at the towering peaks. And I realise how truly small, how truly insignificant I am.

Yet at the same time, I’ve never felt more alive. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. And I’ve tasted that. I suspect my life would never be the same again.